“I just don’t like politics. I enjoy the policy. I enjoy the reform… that actually inspires me to be around great people…. We focus on the policy rather than the politics, to be honest.”
Those were the words New South Wales minister for customer service and digital government, small business and fair trading Victor Dominello used to explain his uncanny ability to stay out of trouble to radio 2GB’s breakfast host Ben Fordham on Wednesday as news of his retirement circulated.
Dominello won’t be released from the Bear Pit (NSW’s lower house) for another 220 days.
Still, the accolades – even from shock jocks – came pouring in for the minister who has personally worn on his sleeve the community’s (and his own) frustration with the clunkiness of government processes.
But those forthcoming 220 days are set to be a sprint for the agencies within his quadrella of portfolios as he seeks to cement in the kind of common sense, time-saving, easy-to-use reforms four NSW premiers have used to differentiate themselves from the previous regime.
The secret sauce to service delivery reform in NSW isn’t really a secret; it just has to work and it can’t take a decade to get there.
Former premier Gladys Berejiklian initially whet the public’s appetite for technology-driven uplift as transport minister by immediately junking the litigation-plagued Tcard public transport ticketing smartcard for a clone of Transport for London’s proven Oyster solution, locally dubbed Opal Card.
It was an unashamedly commercial-off-the-shelf (COTs) solution that eliminated queues, quickened journey times and eased the public into smartcards and trusted mobile-based transactions.
The compromise was that litigious military-industrial equipment provider CUBIC (an acronym unkindly repurposed by some as ‘C U Bstds In Court’) came along for the ride, as did Mastercard and its exclusionary payments hegemony.
Not that the public (yet) cares about whose rails such transactions run on, a key point that Dominello, former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance, and Berejiklian have made since taking office.
How to build a halo
There are two key tricks to the digital services halo effect that the NSW government has generated.
The first is the ability to embrace and adapt contemporary consumer technology to its own purposes, especially customer experience and transactional journey mapping used by successful tech firms.
In government, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when there are rusted-on incumbent technology suppliers with vested interests in supplying ‘government grade’ solutions through procurement processes so cumbersome they repel lean challengers.
Dominello, and before him Perrottet as finance minister opened up and standardised tech procurement across NSW and the dividends have flowed ever since. The same cannot be said for Canberra.
The second trick has been a ruthless, laser focus on delivery and outcomes as much as long-term reform. Dominello wasted no time in citing the list of reforms delivered now literally in the hands of the people of NSW that goes into double digits.
The biggest of them all is the Service NSW super app and wallet that have successfully fused together people’s credentials into digital form that can be used to transact across multiple agencies.
Licencing has also gone digital, straight to mobile (rather than a plastic smartcard), a feat that has jurisdictions across the world looking to NSW.
Perhaps the ultimate tribute came from Canberra when former PM Scott Morrison shamelessly attempted to remould the Department of Human Services into a likeness of Service NSW by creating Services Australia.
The move no doubt sent a shudder down the spine of reformists in NSW.
The tortured journey of the COVIDSafe app speaks for itself, especially when contrasted with the ability of NSW to pump stimulus vouchers and handouts directly into people’s phones.
Unfinished business
Perhaps the biggest work in progress still underway in NSW is the reform of identity documentation and the construction of an interoperable digital identity.
No jurisdiction in Australia has yet successfully nailed this challenge, a problem made all the harder by a legally messy federation and lack of a central citizen identifier endemic outside the Anglosphere.
On this front Dominello is getting right back to basics, taking on digital birth certificates as a building block for utility rather than waiting for the Feds to come to the party.
Ironies run very deep in Australia’s marathon effort to bring functional digital identity into being.
When the late inaugural Digital Transformation Office head Paul Shetler made his first public speech in Sydney citing the urgent need for a national digital identity credential to uplift services, he found at the same conference that NSW was pursuing its own credential in a speech by Dominic Perrottet.
Yet when Shetler and many of his team dumped DTO upon its transformation into a classic federal boutique agency big on purpose but with minimal clout, they defected to NSW and were greeted with open arms and a raft of reform projects.
With tech skills in increasingly short supply, Dominello was smart enough to realise the gift before him and has never looked back.
It’s a far cry from the end of the Howard era, when Joe Hockey saw his attempt to introduce a multipurpose commonwealth-issued Access Card digital credential sacrificed on the hill of electoral expediency after Kevin Rudd’s campaign blasted it as a new Australia Card.
For those working for Victor Dominello, the next 220 days are going to be a cracker.
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