In late 2014, Australia's then-communications-minister and now prime minister Malcolm Turnbull flicked the On switch for Dimension Data's dedicated government cloud.

At a press event staged at Parliament House, Turnbull expressed great enthusiasm for cloud and railed against the box-huggers who refuse to adopt it.

Turnbull launched DiData's cloud just four months after the company's cloud experienced a two-day outage. So at the launch of the government cloud, your correspondent asked Turnbull what he thought of that event.

My notes from the day record Turnbull saying “Nobody likes systems failing or any kind of outage,” before adding that the “important thing is to build in appropriate levels of redundancy and to learn from the incident to ensure that it does not happen again, or the likelihood is greatly reduced.”

I mention that launch and Turnbull's words in light of the failure of Australia's census, which was hosted in the cloud.

Dimension Data's had no role in the census. There is no suggestion it is in any way responsible for recent events.

But The Register has asked the prime minister's office if he stands by those remarks and what he thinks Australia can learn from the failure of the census. We've also asked IBM for comment, as it designed and hosted the census forms. ®