I read earlier this year the new Rudd regime plans a whole-of-government approach to Commonwealth IT services.

Labor believed the Howard Government wasted money allowing an ad-hoc uncoordinated system to develop whereby individual departments and agencies contracted their own services.

Labor is right in this this regard. While decision making at a local level should be permitted, the big picture issues such as architecture and development should be centralised and properly co-ordinated.

I can relate a personal experience of government departments with conflicting systems from a user perspective.

A couple of years ago I registered Juliet with the Family Assistance Office for online access to family tax benefits, Centrelink and childcare information.

All went smoothly and we were able to update our personal details as they changed. This was really handy while we lived at Porepunkah where the nearest Centrelink office was 70km away.

We used the web site less in Kalgoorlie.

Recently, I registered with the new Medicare online service. I accessed it today to change our address and bank account.

I then visited the Family Assistance web site to do the same and found they had changed their system.

Logging in was no problem. I was asked to provide five secret questions and answers, that’s okay.

Then to change details I was told to upgrade to a higher level. Medicare had the same requirement but made it simple by adding some secret questions.

Family Assistance required five secret questions and answers just to access the summary page. To actually do anything needed further proof of identity by completing a complicated questionnaire.

They wanted to know when we received our last payment, how much it was and which account it was paid to.

I keep pretty good records, but I hazard very few people in Australia would have that information at their fingertips and most would not be able to easily obtain it.

The request was overkill and made Family Assistance appear wrongly named, try Family Annoyance.

My point is that Medicare used a simpler method to establish the same credentials to access similarly private information. There should be consistency in what government agencies and departments require.

I’ll go a step further. There should be a one-stop shop for online government services. Users should be able to login to a personal start page with their tax file number or Medicare number.

After proving their identity they should be able to access every government service from a single portal.