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Comment by sebast_bake | Hacker News Reader

Australian here, I think the comments here overstate how bad MyGov is. I'm in my mid 20's, and I have literally never had to call any federal government organisation, visit any service centre or post any forms. For my entire adult life, all of my interactions with federal services have been through MyGov. This includes taxes, welfare, healthcare and education...

I can only imagine how colossal the undertaking must have been. MyGov ties together our largest, most bureaucratic organisations. Imagine being tasked with such an project, building the web application is the easy part, you also need to convince a country's largest organisations to change how they operate.

Considering this, I'm actually surprised how good MyGov is.

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I don’t want to make assumptions about how you use the services in MyGov, but the experience of my family and friends has been that, if you require any service which is at all out-of-the-ordinary or needs a pair of human eyes looking at it (whether or not it should - there are plenty of broken processes at Centrelink, some might say that’s by design) then you need to make a phone call, because the function to perform self-service is simply not there. I have also had fairly good experiences with MyGov - but my interactions with social services are fairly boring compared to the needs of many people.

Edit: the problem here of course is that if you make a phone call you can expect to wait in a queue for many hours.

I've had to call up to get healthcare stuff connected, but I'm actually surprised that the system isn't as bad as I'd expect.

Im in the same boat, except Im older, but i agree with everything youve said.

This seems to be mostly talking about the 'new' mygov.

The new goal was to provide a unified front – users would navigate through MyGov based on their needs and goals and be sent directly to the relevant forms and info from all departments.

EG – instead of going to Centrelink and seeing only JobSeeker, or going to the ATO and seeing only JobKeeper; you’d go to 'COVID relief payments' and see a clear explanation of both, and you’d be able to apply for either one directly.

But in the beta… it’s basically just Centrelink. In the entire 'Health' section, the only medicare service mentioned is the proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

The end result is that https://beta.my.gov.au/en/myaccount/dashboard/ is basically the old mygov, and the rest of the site is a mirror of https://servicesaustralia.gov.au .

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