The scheme, announced by Special Minister for State Gary Nairn, will provide access to services through a single sign-on on a single portal - the government's australia.gov.au site - rather than having to navigate multiple websites and have to re-enter personal details each time.
Speaking at CeBIT's e-government forum yesterday, Mr Nairn said Australians were becoming increasingly comfortable with accessing public services online, with more than 500,000 citizens accessing australia.gov.au a month.
"We think it will be about one in three Australians that access it within a couple of years," he said.
Mr Nairn told AustralianIT the single sign-on scheme would likely start to be operational early next year.
"We anticipate that things have already been done in anticipation of this move will be there pretty quickly," he said. "Already, the Department of Human Services has linked together their agencies like education, Medicare, and Centrelink and we're also likely to see areas like the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Veterans Affairs join early - departments that are already used to lots of dealings with the public."
It will be an opt-in service and Mr Nairn said strict security and privacy standards would be ensured and the new service would require no changes to existing legislation.
Mr Nairn also flagged a future role for government services to make more use of community and interactive internet services features commonly known as Web 2.0.
In particular, he said, web-logging, or blogging, could play a future role in citizen interaction with government.
"Blogs offer an area to get feedback from citizens and to debate issues in reasonable detail," Mr Nairn said. "They can also lead to a new area of citizen interraction.
"For example, Australians in the city can learn more about life and challenges facing people in rural areas and the bush, and rural people can get more of an idea of the issues facing people in the cities."
Mr Nairn told AustralianIT that initial trials of blogging would begin "sooner rather than later" and certainly before this year's Federal Election.
"We would probably start with things like comments on Government Papers that we now put out in a traditional sense for comment," he said.
"We might even have a blog to get ideas about blogging itself to get an idea about potential problems with it, and opportunities."
Autor(en)/Author(s): Roland Tellzen
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 03.05.2007
