Chief executive of Australian tech startup PoweredLocal Michael Jankie described the Census failure as a "slap-in-the face to us all" from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, referring to his promise of "government as an exemplar," and said the ABS's tech suppliers should be punished financially for the poor performance.

He said IBM had shown itself to be unfit for the task, and suggested local providers would have been better prepared. He said it was common for websites to be targeted by hackers, and that it was no longer an acceptable excuse for public failure.

"This will set back electronic voting for years and it makes the industry look bad as a whole, Mr Jankie said.

"While I suspect the failures will be tied back to some odd piece of infrastructure that will be labelled obsolete and removed for the next time round, this was entirely avoidable."

IBRS advisor James Turner meanwhile said the ABS had let itself down and undermined the trust of the Australian public. Jim Rice

Forrester CIO adviser John Brand said the episode demonstrated that large scale internet platforms needed to focus more seriously on threat intelligence, and said it appeared the ABS was relying on outdated methods to protect its systems.

"The fact that these attacks happen either indicates a lack of understanding of the current threat landscape by the ABS and their service providers, or that an even more insidious approach to DDoS attacks has been developed that it is able to go completely undetected by current analysis and monitoring systems," Mr Brand said.

IBRS advisor James Turner meanwhile said the ABS had let itself down and undermined the trust of the Australian public.


He said if a denial of service attack was responsible then the ABS and its service providers were guilty of failing to consult with major commercial organisations – such as the big banks – which regularly repel such attacks.

Out for the count: An error message seen when trying to submit the census.

Or alternately, it was simply a case of the ABS failing to properly assess the likely demand on its site.

"It seems that the ABS completely outsourced responsibility for the design, delivery and testing of the Census website," Mr Turner said.

"But outsourcing these functions does not absolve the customer of responsibility for assuring themselves of the vendor's capability to deliver to requirements. Trust but verify."

Online advocacy organisation Digital Rights Watch meanwhile said an independent investigation of the whole process, including a forensic report of the cause of the website crash, the handling of privacy concerns and the outsourcing of key services to private companies, was needed.

Despite all the political capital spent promoting it, Turnbull's innovation pitch fell on deaf ears, and failed to yield any discernible returns at the ballot box in July. Daniel Munoz

"The Turnbull Government's handling of last night's online Census demonstrates both a total disrespect for personal privacy rights and lack of digital literacy," Digital Rights Watch board member Amy Gray said.

"Now they are botching the explanation of what happened to cause the website to crash and making people even more distrustful of providing their information."

On Wednesday Mr Turnbull said the ABS would be subject to an inquiry, supported by the Australian Signals Directorate - responsible for protecting government agencies from cyber attacks.

