The Digital Australia Authority. The internet isn't a department — it's where every Australian now lives, works and learns. Every one of the seven departments has a digital dimension, and no single one owns it. The DAA closes that gap across all of them.
Minister for Digital Australia
The DAA is not an eighth department — the seven-department structure is kept. It is the digital layer that runs across all seven, owning the online environment none of them can own alone.
Every box below is a link — select any part of the structure to open its policy.
Australia runs one nation through three levels of government, eight state systems and 537 councils — and inside them, hundreds of agencies each on a stack of its own. Defence and Veterans’ Affairs. Nine police forces that cannot read each other’s records. Ambulance, fire and emergency services by state. Every hospital network on its own patient system, so a record does not follow a patient across a border. Courts, corrections and probation separated inside the same state. Every school system, every land titles office, every water authority. Then the back office multiplied hundreds of times over — payroll, procurement, asset registers, HR, rostering, fleet, mapping, case management — each bought separately, licensed separately, maintained separately, and integrated with nothing.
Every one of those systems was rational when it was built. They were built before the tools existed to join them, by organisations with no choice but to solve their own problem in isolation. The failure is not that they exist. The failure is that nothing has changed since — and that the waste this produces is not corruption but duplication: the same address captured hundreds of times, the same eligibility check rebuilt in every agency, the same dataset re-collected because two departments cannot read each other’s format, three levels of government arguing over numbers they each calculated differently.
What has changed is the technology. Joining these systems used to mean replacing them — a decade-long, billion-dollar programme per agency, which is why every attempt failed and why governments stopped promising it. AI removes that requirement. The systems stay where they are and keep running; the national AI reads what each one already produces and maps it into a single format. Integration stops being a rebuild and becomes a translation layer. That is the change that makes a national data system possible now when it was not possible five years ago.
So the commitment is not to replace government IT — that promise has been broken by every government that has made it. It is to join what already exists, keep it running, and stop paying hundreds of times over for the same work. And because the DAA publishes its own performance on the product it builds, the claim is measurable: cost per transaction, forms eliminated, duplicate collections removed, time to decision, payment times, and the falling count of separate systems — all on the Data & Metrics door beside everything else. The full policy is set out in One System.