Saturday 13 August 2016

ABS spent $100k more on pot plants than testing census site - WTF?

*Update: Code Red. How the Bureau of Statistics bungled the 2016 census, Sydney Morning Herald 

Far out. The early stories from the gov and ABS that there was some dastardly evil type attack on the census website grow less and less believable as the days go by. In fact experts are saying that the so called "DDoS" attacks were minor things within Australia that happen all the time, and that IT people have things in place to swat them out as a matter of course.

 The ABS decided to save money on that and didn't have anything in place to deal with such a simple run of the mill problem. Such IT ignorance is astonishing from a gov body, under a PM who speaks of "innovation" as one of the major buzzwords of his gov. I remember Turnbull saying the other month that "every sinew" of gov was about innovation. Such an ignorant IT fuckup, leading to the Great Australian Internet Census Fail of 2016 (the biggest IT fail in Australia's history I suspect) is only going to reflect badly on the Turnbull gov.

Indeed, going online was a cost cutting measure. It wasn't a well thought out procedural move to make things easier for people and more convenient. The cost cutting obviously didn't stop at simply moving online though, with corners cut on the website itself. So much cost cutting in fact that the ABS spent $100,000 more on pot plants last year than testing it's census website.
In a further embarrassment for the ABS, data on government contracts show the bureau spent almost $100,000 more on pot plants last year than it did on testing the Census website.

 This week, an unwanted impact of making those efficiencies was felt as millions of Australians were shut out of the Census when the system comprehensively failed. The New Daily
Here's Kalisch bragging to senate estimates about how much money was going to be saved by doing the census online. Gee that worked out well didn't it. 



Of course this is all very familiar to us poor sods who have any dealings with Centrelink these days. Same story as above; cut costs by sending stuff to online whilst cutting costs on the website set up as well. They tell you you have to do this and that online, and then the site doesn't work. Sometimes it goes down for a day or so and ends up in the news. This gov just has no idea about IT. 

 
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