Through high technology, Australia focuses on actions to promote social protection for citizens

Brasília, April 5, 2016 – With one of the largest databases in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia’s priority is to increase the number of social services and benefits available through digital interfaces, optimizing public efforts to target public policies. The motto is to “pay the right people the right amount to which they are entitled, at the right moment in their lives,” in the words of Andrea Jones, the National Manager of Information and Data Services at the Department of Human Services in Australia.

Jones visited Brazil to share her experience in Australia with national officials from other countries at the International Seminar on Database Integration and Information Systems for Public Policy Improvement, held in Brasília on April 5 and 6.

It was by focusing on the quality of the user experience that the Australian Department of Human Services decided to treat citizens exclusively as “customers,” starting in 1997. That year, Australia created three social protection agencies (Child Support, Medicare, and Centrelink, the latter being responsible for retirement pensions and benefits payments).

In 2010, the agency decided to deal with the redundancy involved in maintaining various databases, integrating the systems from the three agencies at all levels, with a single e-mail system and combined infrastructure. Now, the three agencies still exist, but they are part of the same body.

The result has been 14 petabytes of citizen data collected over 40 years, including address information, work records, and principal events in citizens’ lives: illnesses, marriages, births, deaths, and other family-related events in the social welfare system.

Having successfully integrated its systems, something which other countries are still struggling to do, Australia is starting to look for new ways to interact with citizens.

One example of this is the government portal myGov, where users can view their health records, tax status, social benefits, retirement funds, and various other items, from a total of 35 agencies whose services can be accessed with a single username and password.  Documents destined for multiple agencies can be scanned and sent through the portal.

Handling payments on the order of 160 billion Australian dollars comes with the responsibility of ensuring information quality, according to Andrea Jones. “We exchange data with 350 different agencies and private organizations to guarantee the integrity of the information provided by our customers,” she stated.

This includes exchanging information with the employment, health, tax, and even immigration departments.

To achieve these results, the Department of Human Services was allocated 1.5 billion Australian dollars from the national budget for the next seven years, in order to transform the way “we do business with our customers,” said the National Manager of the department.

Among some of the promising initiatives, cognitive technology stands out, where machines can learn through interactions with human beings. Projects with IBM and Microsoft, as well as a partnership with the producers of the film Avatar, are seeking to develop forms of artificial intelligence that would be able to communicate with disabled persons, among other tasks.