Governing for Trust: Inclusive, Efficient, and Secure Digital Public Infrastructure

Digital public infrastructure now carries the weight of welfare payments, health records, and identity for hundreds of millions of citizens across Australia and India. Yet the governance conversation remains anchored in a twentieth-century idea: that security means keeping intruders out. This keynote argues for a different starting point, where breaches are treated as inevitable and governance is judged by how well systems absorb, contain, and recover from them without harming the people who depend on them for welfare and healthcare. Drawing on Australia's digital identity and health record systems and India's Aadhaar–UPI–ABDM stack, the talk examines what “inclusive, efficient and secure” actually requires in practice — data minimalism, structural decentralisation, and consequence absorption, not perimeter defence alone. It closes with a shared governance agenda both countries can test against each other's experience.

In a nation of over 270 million people, precise data governance is critical. However, Indonesia’s Ministry of National Development Planning reports that 46% of social assistance recipients are mistargeted due to data errors. As a government auditor, I have observed that the root cause is severe public-sector data fragmentation. Unfortunately, local digitalization often falls into the trap of superficial “app gimmicks”, agencies launch new applications without robust databases, relying on third-party developers who cut ties upon delivery. This creates a wide capability gap, as there is no sustainable data training for civil servants.

Drawing on local government audit experiences, this talk untangles Indonesia's system interoperability challenges and the illusion of superficial digitalization. It explores the urgency of implementing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to shift the paradigm from multiplying isolated apps toward building an integrated data ecosystem. This critical competency gap in the field ultimately motivated me to pursue a Master of Data Science. This presentation highlights why strengthening internal public capacity and adopting DPI are absolute prerequisites for delivering truly evidence-based, transparent, and accountable public services.

Improving sovereign Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has become a global governance imperative. Australia’s Medibank, Optus and Qantas cyber breaches exposed sensitive data across approximately 25.2 million records cumulatively, revealing how data fragmentation across public and private databases creates an unmanageably vast attack surface. This presentation evaluates Australia’s myID digital identity schema, a core pillar of the 2023–2030 “Horizon” strategy, as a case study in secure-by-design DPI. We examine how digital identity management reduces data “honeypots”.

Secondly, we address the dilemma of governing for trust: why tech architectures fail without last-mile adoption. While technological capabilities exist, public hesitancy remains high, particularly among vulnerable, non-English speaking, and sceptical populations. We draw insights from real-world adoption challenges and propose key future research directions to bridge the gap between technical resilience and widespread adoption.