E-government lessons from Down Under

One difference between the Australians and us Brits is their no-worries ability to do certain things well. No, I'm not talking about cricket, but electronic government.

Take, for example, the Australian Taxation Office's (ATO's) e-tax system. By the end of November 2002, the ATO had logged more than 550,000 online returns, compared with 282,000 in 2001. That's a quarter of the 2.2 million Australians who fill out tax forms themselves.

The ATO claims that it can top three-quarters of a million next year. Compare that with the 76,000 returns collected online by the Inland Revenue during the last tax year, out of five million self-assessment taxpayers who do their own returns, and the UK figure looks pretty lame.

Just as Australian sporting success is partly due to government support, which it has enjoyed since the 1970s, the same is true for the ATO. It invested in technology at about the same time, and has kept up to date by installing a local area network in 1989.

Most Australians pass their tax returns to an accountant, so these returns were the first to be done electronically with a pilot in 1989. Now, 95 per cent are received in this way.

The electronic payment of tax has been introduced gradually since 1997, thus avoiding most of the security and reliability scares suffered by the Inland Revenue.

The ATO has an advantage in driving the use of electronic lodgement by agents because Australians get a refund when their returns are processed, and they get the cash faster if the return is filed electronically.

When the Inland Revenue opened its electronic tax return filing system in 2000, it offered a £10 discount. But this had little effect, as the initial poor quality of the system, with four out of five attempts failing, more than cancelled out the incentive.

We're being outplayed in other games too. Other e-government operations in Australia include a 15-minute online joint approval for routine exports from both the Customs and Quarantine departments. That's joined-up government to you and I.

The UK might balk at the reason for many of these initiatives. John Howard's Liberal Party was elected to the federal government in 1996, and has since implemented a programme of year-on-year budget cuts.

In services such as the ATO or Centrelink, the Australian combination of the Benefits Agency and Employment Service, this has sparked innovative thinking.

But in education and health, which will always be skilled labour-intensive, Australia has fallen behind.

The Liberals may now be paying the price: the state of Victoria, where the party pioneered the concept of efficiency cuts, decisively re-elected the centrist Labour Party at the end of November 2002.

This was the election for the Victoria state government, a separate body to the federal government, which is still controlled by the Liberals.

Labour in the UK believes in spending more on education and health. But that doesn't invalidate the idea of forcing efficiency cuts on departments that exist to process data and money.

But politics interfered. The UK attempt to learn from Centrelink by combining the benefits and employment offices has been heavily opposed by unions, and paying benefits and pensions into bank accounts (a reality in Australia for a decade) saw it get tangled up in the argument about maintaining rural post offices.

Australia doesn't have all the e-government answers. But seeing IT as a way of providing existing services more efficiently, rather than grandiose empire building, certainly helps your batting average.