Around Australia this week the chief executives and directors of our big banks, telecommunications companies and others that are driven by the internet sent out an urgent call to their technical people:
“Could the raids that shut down the census on Tuesday be conducted against our business?”
The CEOs/directors I spoke to received their replies very quickly: “No, no a thousand times no.”
It does not mean that the data and transactional systems operated by our large businesses are not vulnerable to the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks.
But modern anti-attack mechanisms have overcome disruptions like the apparent flooding of the census site with demand. They structure their sites so there are thousands of duplicated entry points (please excuse me if I have oversimplified the explanation) and those defence mechanisms must have been known by IBM.
I suspect that problems in the census are a surface manifestation of much deeper problems. Because of bad management by a succession of poor politicians on both sides of parliament and compliant public service chiefs, computer installations have become a crazy game in parts of the public service.
Under the budget games that are played, public servants often find themselves with money to spend on capital items but under no circumstances are they allowed to increase their operational expenditure.
Modern systems are based on the cloud and that slashes capital costs but causes an operational cost increase. Overall the costs are much lower and the ability to provide secure information and services is greatly increased.
And so the public service stays with the outdated ways of developing and replacing existing systems, which involves big capital outlays but no increase in operational cost.
I do not know whether the Australian Bureau of Statistics is one of the departments that has been affected by this crazy syndrome. However one can envisage that in a cost-constrained world some ABS committee may have decided to save money by not putting in protection against denial of service attacks. Alternatively one of the young graduates who often work on IBM accounts may have made a simple omission error.
The new minister who suddenly found himself in the front line of the census debacle was Michael McCormack — the man hand-picked by Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce to carry the vital small business portfolio in the 45th parliament. With the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, McCormack needs to get to the bottom of what happened, remembering that there will be skilled ‘Yes Minister’ style cover-up attempts.
Strangely, on Thursday morning, I attended a Small Enterprise Association breakfast in Melbourne where McCormack was scheduled to give the first ministerial commentary on the historic unfair contracts act which comes into operation on November.
Understandably, because of the census crisis, McCormack could not leave Canberra. Senator Scott Ryan replaced McCormack and described the unfair contracts act as requiring a fundamental cultural change in the business community which would greatly increase employment in the nation.
When I pointed out to Ryan that the public servants in Canberra had cleverly slipped in a clause to the legislation that exempted them from the requirement to have fair contracts with small enterprises and pay promptly, Ryan was surprised. He promised to take the issue up with McCormack and other ministers.
The unfair contracts legislation was supported by the government, the ALP, the Greens and the old Senate cross bench. We will need a lot more of these sort of agreements if Australia is to prosper and so sensible decisions can be made on Canberra’s computer systems.
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