Mutual obligation is one of the last great shibboleths of Australian politics. Now the entire system is under scrutiny with potentially big implications for our welfare system.

Mutual obligation is one of the last great shibboleths of Australian politics. Now the entire system is under scrutiny with potentially big implications for our welfare system.

  •  memfree   ( @memfree@beehaw.org ) English
    8·
    6 months ago

    Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

    That’s a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don’t do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

    And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.