You're Doing the Government's Admin. For Free.
You're doing the government's admin.
For free.
Every time you have to work out which department can help, you're connecting the dots for government.
Government Is Organised Around Departments. Your Life Isn't.
Nobody wakes up thinking "today I need the Australian Taxation Office." They wake up thinking "I'm moving house," "I've had a baby," "I lost my job," "Mum died." Those are life events. Each one touches several agencies, at different levels of government, with different forms, logins and rules about what counts as proof.
The government's structure follows its org chart. Citizens are left to translate between their situation and that chart, and the translation is the work. You have to know which agency owns which piece, find the right page, discover there's a second form, and remember the one agency nobody mentioned until a letter goes to your old address.
That isn't a user error. It's the design.
America.gov Took a Swing at It
On 29 September, the US launched America.gov. Where you'd expect a menu of departments, it puts a prompt. Say what you need, and it tries to find the right service, drawing on official government sites and linking back to the sources.
Early coverage has flagged inconsistent answers and trust concerns, and those need fixing. An AI that confidently sends you to the wrong form is worse than a menu, because a menu at least shows its limits. When the stakes are your benefits, your tax or your passport, being right matters more than sounding helpful.
But building the front door around what people need is the right call. It starts from the person's words instead of the department's name, which is the shift this kind of service has needed for decades.
The Front Door Is Only Half of It
A better front door helps you find the right service. It doesn't stop you having to deal with five of them.
So I mocked up a quick myGov concept.
Say you're moving house. In the concept, you tell government once, and one address change reaches the agencies that need it. You type something like "We're moving to Margaret River next month," and myGov works out the rest: Centrelink, Medicare, the Tax Office and the electoral roll, ticked off one by one. You approve every change. Government does the routing.
Have a play with it yourself. It's a quick scripted concept, so it knows a handful of life moments. Try moving house, a new baby, Medicare, tax or losing your job. It's unofficial, not connected to any real services, and inspired by America.gov.
To be fair, myGov already does a version of this. If you've linked the ATO, Centrelink or Medicare, you can send an address change to them, along with a couple of others. That's a genuine start. But the moment your life crosses outside that list, you're back to doing it yourself. Your driver licence and car registration sit with the state. The electoral roll is its own process, which is why the concept puts it on the same list. Anything you haven't linked doesn't hear about it at all.
The concept isn't a new technology. It's a change in who owns the job.
Who Owns the Job
This is the same pattern I keep running into in Australian government services. The passport process charges A$422 and still hands you a printer. The digital arrival card only worked on its third attempt, once someone decided where the work should sit instead of which app to build. Each time, the technology was ready long before the decision about who does the work was made.
Good service design moves effort from the person to the system. Telling government once is the purest version of that idea. The person states a fact about their life one time. The system, which already knows which agencies hold their records, does the routing.
It also changes what failure looks like. Today, if you forget to update one agency, that's your problem and your penalty. When the system owns the job, a missed update becomes the system's bug, and that's where it belongs.
That Job Belongs to Government
America.gov fixes the front door. The next step is making sure that once you've walked through it, you only have to say things once.
You shouldn't need to understand how government is organised to get what you need from it.
That job belongs to government, not you.
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