I have known a few people working in IT in government in Australia and it sounds like absolute hell. It takes a special kind of person to work in government. You either have to be extremely incompetent to the point you cant even tell that things around you are a disaster, or you have to not give a shit to the point where waiting a month for someone to press a button does not bother you and you are only focused on what you will be doing when you get home at the end of the day.

This one guy I knew told me that he had seen meetings dedicated to working out how they could spend money since they hadn't spent the whole budget yet. Services run over hundreds of servers when it could be done in one just to keep the whole team of system admins employed.

Government departments are filled with bloat to a level you wouldn't believe.