While I didn't work directly on myGov, I knew quite a few people on the team that did (at all levels) and had a fair number of depressing pub sessions with them lamenting the entire project. This article doesn't say much that the people working on it weren't saying throughout the entire delivery.
I'm not going to defend the ludicrous cost of the project; we all know that outsourcing to private consultants to save money is a neoliberal pipe-dream up there with "trickle-down" economics. Many of the contractors for government agencies are former public sector workers who have been driven out by the laughably uncompetitive wages and the government's hostile attitude towards the APS.
And can you blame someone for leaving a job where they aren't supported and are mocked by the governing party in the media, when they can do essentially the same job with less bureaucratic oversight and twice the pay as a consultant or contractor? Why would they stay? A sense of civic duty? That's called "being a gullible c*nt" here in Australia.
The article even points this out:
> "Agencies are somewhat compromised by no longer having lots of these skills in-house."
No shit. Who knew systematically de-funding your own public service meant it would lose efficacy? Starve the beast[1] is a toxic political strategy that never should have made it across the pacific.
So that's why myGov is expensive; we're paying to support an entire ecosystem of middlemen. But if you want to know why it's a shit-show these quotes from the article point to (imo) the biggest cause:
> Responsibility for the "enhancement" of myGov was transferred from the DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) to Services Australia (formerly Department of Human Services/Department of Social Security) in late 2020
> "Individual agencies continue to do their own thing [...]"
MyGov was meant to integrate government services, but none of the agencies would actually expose a single endpoint for the myGov team to integrate. Months and months were spent just trying to get agencies to accept that for an integrated platform to work they would need to support a common authentication system. Doesn't leave much to do except polish the UI, does it?
This quote from the article literally made me laugh out loud:
> "What's so hard about making these improvements? I don't understand why it has taken that long and cost so much money to do that."
> The main goal of myGov was to integrate a range of government services from different departments seamlessly on the one platform. But the new beta version of the platform still doesn't do that effectively
The problem wasn't technical, it was institutional. The Australian tax payer just spent millions of dollars hiring consultants to try and herd cats. They weren't outsourcing for developers as much as they were outsourcing for mediators.
The DTA was meant to be the solution to digital integration of government agencies in Australia by setting up an internal government digital agency. But the large entrenched agencies (such as Services Australia) had no real incentive to listen to a word it said and every incentive to resist relinquishing control to it.
The agency is for all intents-and-purposes now dead. It's only remaining responsibilities are "advisory". Even the official design system inspired by the highly praised GOV.UK one was decommissioned practically before it got off the ground [2]
The myGov and DTA story isn't some simplistic private vs public sector issue. This is a fundamental culture issue within Australia (and it seems the whole anglosphere at the moment). No one is happy except the ministers and executives rorting record amounts of cash out of the system.
Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.