New Australian government website focused on user needs to go live by end of year

A new government website for Australia, focused around citizens’ needs rather than government structures, could be launched by the end of the year, Paul Shetler, chief executive of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office (DTO), has told Global Government Forum.

The site, which will bring together a number of government services structured around the tasks users wish to complete as well as government departments, passed its first Alpha assessment earlier this month.

It has drawn its source code from Britain’s government which consolidated hundreds of individual websites on the gov.uk portal. But, Shetler, who worked at the UK’s Ministry of Justice as well as the Government Digital Service (GDS) before he was recruited by the Australian Government last year, said that DTO’s vision for gov.au is “moving well beyond what gov.uk did.”

It will, he added, provide a “user journey across a number of different agencies and levels of government, that should help the user to just get stuff done.”