[LINK] Straw Pole of Good Bad and ugly online government services

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Running this one up the pole (sorry, but you're going to be stuck with 
pole jokes!).

This year was the first time I was sufficiently together to do the car 
registration online (that is, I had everything done nice and early).

The entire process worked perfectly (NSW RTA Website). The registration 
check went from the mechanic to the RTA; the CTP insurance ditto; and 
the process on the RTA site only took a couple of minutes - and it 
worked properly on a Mac.

So: points for the RTA. I agree with you on that one.

Most of my "bad list" sites lately aren't government. Australian car 
rental sites are a veritable hell on Earth - you cannot for eg say "find 
me a Tarago in Sydney", you have to search location-by-location. You 
can't give it a range of start and finish dates - you have to pick a 
date, and if there's nothing available go back and try another date. The 
process is almost uniform on most sites (Budget, Thrifty, Avis, Hertz, 
Europcar), and uniformly atrocious. AND the booking didn't work, so that 
when I got the "cold shivers" a few days before the booking, and phoned 
to confirm, "no, we don't have you listed" (I sent the confirmation 
e-mail as proof, no dice).

RC



Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> In March, I am facilitating a workshop on getting more from time and
> money invested in online services.
>
> Examples are useful and I wondered if linkers have been delighted by
> any online government services.
>
> For the purposes of this exercise I would like to include all three
> tiers of government and educational institutions if only to include 
> austlii on my good list :-).
>
> On the Good List so far:
> *the RTA motor vehicle registration -integrating pink slips
> (roadworthyness check) and green slips(third party insurance)
> *austlii
> *NSW Land Titles
> *Victorian e-government resource centre http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/
> *ATO annual return system for accountants
>
> My own experience with the ATO - E-BAS is that I registered in 2000 -
> but did not survive their initial upgrades and continue to make paper
> returns.
> DCITA is currently on my bad list - as I don't think I should have to
> upgrade my browser to view a text document.
>
> Note, I am keen to hear of effectiveness rather than the technical
> aspects of the website. eg - I don't use the ATO annual return system,
> but my accountant does and it seems to provide a good turn around.
>
> Marghanita