this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Could this be the death of Australia's nightmarish welfare system? (www.crikey.com.au)
submitted 4 days ago by brisk@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Mutual obligation is one of the last great shibboleths of Australian politics. Now the entire system is under scrutiny with potentially big implications for our welfare system.

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[–] memfree@beehaw.org 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

That's a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don't do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.

[–] SamuraiBeandog@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've worked as a developer in government software and it is a fucking shitshow from top to bottom. I would not trust any piece of government built software with anything remotely important. Which is terrifying.

[–] johnwicksdog@aussie.zone 2 points 1 day ago

100%. There's so many people who want to "touch" the project so they can get some credit for it, making things take easily four times as long as it should and in the end you have an unmanageable, noncompliant mess.