2014: SUBMISSION: Welfare Reform & Financial Systems Inquiry
From 2014.
In 2014, the Centre for Digital Business made submissions to the McClure Welfare Reform and the Murray Financial Systems Inquiry in Australia.
The Centre for Digital Business Submission can be read here. Author: Marie Johnson. Centre for Digital Business.
The Centre for Digital Business advocated the need for a federated digital identity framework based on standards, as an enabler for welfare policy reform and innovation and as a critical element for the future robustness of the financial systems.
The Centre for Digital Business advocacy was formally acknowledged.
The Financial System Inquiry Final Report, Chapter3 - Innovation recommendation:
“Strengthen Australia’s digital identity framework through the development of a national strategy for a federated-style model of trusted digital identities.”
This is a combined submission from the Centre for Digital Business to the McClure Welfare Reform consultation process and the Murray Financial Systems inquiry. The submission highlights serious issues for government administration in Australia in the fragmentation of payment arrangements across government that compromise policy.
It connects issues raised across a number of government reports and reforms (financial service inquiry, the National Commission of Audit, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and the Reserve Bank of Australia New Payments Platform) – common themes of payments, identity strategy and the lack of a whole-of-government technology strategy at the Commonwealth level.
There is currently an historic and possibly serendipitous convergence of strategies – the recasting of the welfare reform architecture at the time when the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is implementing a new payments architecture through the New Payments Platform (NPP) following the RBA Strategic Review of Innovation in the Payments System – against the backdrop of the inquiry into the future of Australia’s financial system.
At the same time that the proposed McClure welfare reforms are being considered and the RBA work on the NPP is being implemented, there are very significant investment processes underway across Commonwealth Government agencies that directly relate to payments and information services.
These investments are made in the absence of a whole-of-government transformation strategy; in the absence of whole-of-government technology strategy; and in the absence of a whole-of-government strategic payments capability architecture. This is akin to building a town without a town plan. Such fragmentation of payment arrangements affects all social welfare delivery.
The submission also highlights issues for the states.
Other discussion points from the Centre for Digital Business submission include:
The only “centerpiece” in a digital strategy – is the client experience and client choice.
In the digital era, payments are more than just payments: the payment operating models when architected strategically are policy levers, generating data and providing insight into the efficacy of the policy.
A whole-of-government strategic payments capability architecture would provide the Government with the potential to consider new and innovative commercial models that comes from a system-wide perspective. It would appear that the current fragmented agency-by-agency approach generates arbitrage opportunities for players in the payments system – banks, merchants, ATM operators – and which comes at a cost to government and to the client.
The team doing this must unapologetically be the world’s best. Drawn from all sectors and disciplines: the best from the giants of the web; human factor specialists; designers; systems thinkers; modelers; architects; and innovators from both the developed and emerging markets. The sourcing of this talent will not be through a long drawn out procurement process but through an innovative process akin to the process of mobilizing reserves.