IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Chris Bowen, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, announced today that a digital photograph and fingerprint scans will be collected from everyone applying for a protection visa within Australia.

"This initiative will assist in establishing the identity of protection visa applicants who arrive in Australia but are often unable to provide sufficient documentation to prove their identity, and strengthen our ability to detect inconsistent immigration claims," he said.

Health Vault, which is a cloud based service, is being offered to patients by some clinics such as the Virginia Mason Clinic in Seattle and Denver Health in the US. It allows patients to use the cloud to store and access their health related information – and also allow their medical providers access to the content.

And doctors will have to mothball millions of dollars worth of new computer equipment as another fallout of the troubled Telehealth scheme.

From January 1, more than eight million people in outer urban and semi-regional areas will be stripped of their Medicare rebate for internet video consultations with medical specialists, as their suburbs and towns are reclassified as "major cities".

A study by Infosys has found nearly all Australians are comfortable with sharing personal information with medical practitioners.

The business and IT consulting firm discovered that 94 per cent of people would be fine with sharing the information at a regular doctor’s office and 92 per cent at a local hospital.

The company said that the technology, which identifies a person by their speech, will cut waiting times for users and boost security. NAB said up to 40 per cent of customers forget their phone banking passwords.

It comes a month after ANZ announced it was looking into retina and fingerprint scanning as part of a $1.5 billion investment to upgrade customer services.

The National Australian Bank (NAB) is undergoing a “total environment transformation” with IT, the bank’s officials told media at a recent lunch in Sydney. A central part of the initiative is a move to “infrastructure on demand”.

NAB seeks to reduce risk by moving to industry standard IT approaches, create economic value by lowering the cost of delivery and creating new revenue streams, and become more responsive to change, said NAB group executive, Gavin Slater

Work to connect the service to 130,000 new homes, farms and businesses is expected to be underway by mid 2016.

About 10,400 of those recipients are in Queensland, covering regional towns near Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gympie and the Sunshine Coast.

Rather than dealing with the controversial public face of e-government, the NICTA group will look at improving interconnection between agencies' and departments' databases and IT systems.

Almost 45,000 homes in 26 regions across Australia are set to receive fibre and fixed wireless broadband in the continuing rollout of the NBN.

The rollout will bring fibre(F) to 20,700 premises in selected suburbs of most major Australian cities.

The report, entitled "Australia - The National Broadband Network", says questions remain about the business model for Australia's new digital network, and that NBN's architecture and design decisions will likely establish the basis of the new network for at least the next 25 years.

The Australian Federal Labor Government has worked with the WA State Labor Government to deliver on a $9.3 million ‘Clever Networks Program’ to improve telecommunications networks in Western Australia.

The study, headed by Associate Professor Robin Gauld from the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, set out to see if e-government was making government services more responsive.

“Our key and consistent finding was that the Australian agencies performed significantly worse than their New Zealand counterparts, bringing into question their higher ranking in international e-government studies and also their potential to deliver on the Australian government policy that e-government means more responsive government.”

Tom Bowden, chief executive of Auckland-based secure messaging and integration specialist HealthLink, said Australia had failed to do the hard work on building basic capacity, setting standards and improving data quality.

"All the really flash stuff has been worked on and there's been lots of bright ideas, but the real effort is still to be done and we won't see solid progress until that occurs," he said.

Central government agencies on both sides of the Tasman have scored poorly in a University of Otago study of e-government responsiveness published online by Government Information Quarterly, the top ranked journal in the field.

Professor Robin Gauld, Director of the Centre for Health Systems in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, says the longitudinal study — carried out in 2006, 2008 and 2013 — involved sending an email to 790 Australian and 115 New Zealand, national, state and local government agencies asking their location and opening hours.

Wellington City Council is preparing to roll out a new monitoring network to collect data on active transport to better inform effective, evidence-based decision-making in a cost-effective way.

Data collected by the new traffic counting sensors will include counts of different types of road users, paths of travel, and travel speeds, including cars, trucks, bicycles, scooters, buses and pedestrians.

The Federal Government’s mobile strategy does not bind state governments, which have their own plans for making increased use of mobile devices and services as part of their wider IT strategies. The NSW Government released its IT strategy in 2012. Curiously it has very little to say on the first of the two aspects of mobility identified in the Federal Government roadmap - the use of mobile devices by government agencies to help them fulfil their roles more efficiently and effectively.

The report, Australians' Use of and Satisfaction with e-Government Services – 2007, set out to provide an overview of the range and uptake of e-government services. Amongst its key findings, the report discovered that although the most common way of contacting government remains in person, this has steadily declined over the past three years: from 46 percent in 2004–05 and 43 percent in 2006, to 37 percent in 2007.

The popularity of Service SA’s online service delivery has increased, with the South Australian government reporting a 14 per cent increase in online registration renewals this year.

The online shop, which contains secure purchasing facilities for residents to pay bills, renew vehicle or boat registration, and apply for a birth, death or marriage certificate, was introduced in 2009.