#CensusFail shows need for PS culture change

The Census failure has reduced the public’s confidence in a once-trusted fundamental government service.

The implications of the Census denial of service attack go far beyond a single security incident. This is no longer just about a technical problem to be solved. In the light of the recommendations from two government enquires, there are much bigger issues about governance and leadership, as well as some long-term questions about entrenched public service culture.

As Bureau of Statistics senior executives ponder the recommendation for them to attend a cyber boot camp in the coming year, it is time to move the spotlight from technology, contracts and blame attribution. There is now a clear need to look at the impact of digital transformation not only in the way government services are delivered, but also in terms of the implications for the underlying ground rules of public sector leadership.

Important implications

On Census night, many Australians settled down after dinner to fill out their online Census form, only to be locked out due to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

No data was lost, no government IT infrastructure was compromised, and the Census was eventually completed. From a technical purist perspective, there was no actual security breach, and the system was successfully shut down before there could be any chance of damage.

However, the damage in public credibility had already been done. The Census gained its own hashtag #CensusFail, and commentary in social media quickly took over from official government messaging. It was no longer a situation of government informing the public, but the public informing government via a wide-ranging social media discussion. The ABS had already lost control of the agenda, but doggedly kept going with the original public information campaign. As the technical recovery progressed, the widening gap between the unchanging information campaign and public commentary became all too apparent.

The loss of public support is a significant challenge for any government agency. The government sector differs in some very important ways from the private sector. Typically, government does not have competitors in the market, and citizens are frequently compelled by law to deal with particular government agencies. However, in any democratic government, the role of the public service is to serve the public. In a 21st-century digital world, community feedback is very quick and very direct.

Need for change

In the aftermath of the DDoS attack, the federal government commissioned its Cyber Security Special Advisor, Alastair MacGibbon, to undertake a comprehensive review of the events. The Senate also decided to undertake its own separate review. Both studies took a broader view of the events.

The MacGibbon report was particularly clear in its findings about the need for broader cultural change to address the reality of digital government. The report’s executive summary commenced: “The Australian Government’s new paradigm for online engagement and services is not coming. It is already here… Cyber security is about availability of services and confidence in government in a digital age. And the public’s confidence in the ability of government to deliver took a serious blow, more so than any previous IT failure… But crucially important is the need to understand how the Census got to the point where the cyber security arrangements brought into question the trust and confidence in a fundamental government service. The public’s lack of confidence will linger.”

Numbers tell the story

In the end, the Census did achieve an impressive online response rate of 96.5%, with 58% of households participating online. However, the damage is played out more importantly through measures of public sentiment. In the past, the ongoing success of the Census has been due to its reputation as a reliable and valued tool, both for business and for the community. This time, government surveys found the Census had taken a significant blow in the eyes of the public. A massive 42% of the public said that to some extent the Census had been a failure, and 33% agreed to some extent that the data collected by the Census was unreliable.

Looking forward, the big challenge will be to deal proactively with the realities of digital government. The digital genie cannot be put back into the bottle.