#CensusFail is what you get for gutting the public service

When Malcolm Turnbull announced his digital ideas boom last year, I doubt that the flaming wreck of the Australian Bureau of Statistics servers on census night was what he had in mind.

The disaster has been so great that blame has been shunted in just about every direction, from IBM, one of the world’s largest corporations, to the notorious hackers of the Chinese swim team.

We may never know whether a DDoS attack actually happened. Despite the claims of the ABS executives, there is at this point no evidence for such an attack. But what we do know is that this disaster was statistically certain.

The result is predictable: without experts in the area, without the necessary funding to make projects a success, with overloaded bureaucracies concerned more about saving money than delivering services, failure is all but guaranteed.

The starting point for understanding this predictability is not the technical failures of the census website, or the anger generated by the ABS’ wanton disregard for the privacy concerns that were widely expressed in the lead-up to the census.

Rather, what we have to understand is the decades-long gutting of the capacities and expertise of the Australian Public Service (APS). Ever since Howard was elected in 1997, the APS has undergone rounds of cost cutting. This has left departments understaffed and lacking the technical capabilities required for their work.

As the Community and Public Sector Union pointed out, “There are 700 fewer staff at the ABS now than when the last Census was conducted five years ago and as a result staff are suffering under massive workloads”.

The loss of those 700 staff has inevitably meant the loss of a wealth of knowledge. The chief of the ABS has admitted that the computer systems the agency relies on are up to 40 years old – that’s older than Mark Zuckerberg! It is only people who have worked on these systems for years who can properly support them, yet the staffing levels keep being cut, and cut, and cut.

Indeed, as early as February the head of the ABS was aware that the census could not be delivered to scope due to budget reductions, the head of the department telling the executive, “[T]he program will not be able to deliver on the current scope, timetable and/or budget. This status is as a consequence of both budget reductions since program commencement and program delays during 2014”.

Across the APS, the heads of departments see IT systems development as a silver bullet against budget woes. Who needs staff to conduct a census when you can get people to log on themselves or face hundreds of dollars in fines? Who needs employees at a Centrelink office when people can be forced to use the inadequate services on their website? Indeed, the head of the ABS told the government to great acclaim that the online census would mean a saving of just over $100 million.

At the same time, when a sacrifice needs to be made to the god of budgets, it is often IT departments that are the first at the altar. Departments are denuded of staff, infrastructure and resources and work are outsourced to major corporations like IBM. The result is predictable: without experts in the area, without the necessary funding to make projects a success, with overloaded bureaucracies concerned more about saving money than delivering services, failure is all but guaranteed.

Indeed, #CensusFail occurs just three years after the Queensland government blacklisted IBM following a massive payroll system debacle which caused thousands of health workers to be underpaid or not paid at all. In the past decade numerous large-scale public sector IT projects have failed for the exact same reasons.

Yet, the outsourcing of IT from the public service is continues apace. Right now, the ATO is currently engaged in offshoring significant IT development.

All of this is a consequence of the neoliberal and austerity-driven policies that have governed the APS for the past two decades. The blame that everyone is so keen to assign lies firmly at the feet of governments that have done everything they can to run the public sector into the ground.

Turnbull has said he wants heads to roll as a consequence of this debacle. His should be the first on the chopping block.