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Australia Ready to Study Blockchain Technology to Deliver Welfare Payments in 2019

Blockchain technology has the potential to change the way governments and institutions work. And the Australian Government knows that. The country has revealed plans to start using blockchain technology so as to deliver security welfare payments.

Australia Studies Blockchain for Welfare Payments

The information has been released by Randall Brugeaud, Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) chief executive, during a conference in Sydney the last week. The agency has been established in 2015 so as to implement a broader digitization agenda and promote the use of new technologies in different agencies of the state.

According to the local newspaper, ZDNet, Mr. Randall Brugeaud said:

“Our plan is to look for use cases across the Commonwealth with an initial focus on the welfare payments delivery system, then working with our digital service standard, we’ll conduct user research with a view to having a prototype by the end of next financial year.”

The DTA agency has now assigned $527,000 U.S. dollars in order to explore different solutions with distributed ledger technology (DLT). The budget has been planned for the 2018-19 period and it is an opportunity for the agency to explore different innovative ways to deliver government services through the blockchain.

With a social security welfare implemented via blockchain, the transparency will be increased, the payments will be processed almost instantly, and it will allow the institution to have a better control on the amounts of money moved.

“The potential of blockchain to securely record transactions will be investigated, drawing on the experience of other public and private sector organizations,” Mr. Brugeaud explained. “We’ll also build on work done across government already, such as the CSIRO’s work on distributed ledgers.”

Additionally, Randall Brugeaud said that they are trying to follow other governments and institutions around the world to take new ideas and try to implement them in different sectors of the government.

Australian Prime Minister Wants Blockchain Solutions

The Australian Prime Minister, Malcom Turnbull, is heading the country towards adoption blockchain technology. It has directed the DTA to start studying potential applications of distributed ledger technology across different areas of the government.

According to local news sources, Peter Alexander, DTA chief digital officer, revealed that the exploration of blockchain technology has been requested by the PM. About it, Mr. Alexander commented:

“The Prime Minister in fact wrote to our minister [assistant minister for digital transformation Michael Keenan] and asked us to have a look at blockchain, which evolved into this particular piece of work. […] ASIC [was] looking at blockchain, Immigration – now Home Affairs – was looking at blockchain and considering it, and more agencies were talking about it.”

There are many different agencies that would like to implement blockchain technology. With DLT some tasks can be processed more precisely, the bureaucratic papers can be reduced, and the overall efficiency of an office can be enhanced by implementing this disruptive technology.

There are several institutions all over the world that are using blockchain, including private banks and other companies. The possibilities linked to the use of this technology are immense and the public and private sector are investing important sums of money on it