Dead Dogs and Bureaucrats

When CX Meets RX and PaaS, Public Sector Strongholds Will Crumble

In Tasmania, the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is more than just an extinct species. It is an emblem of the state. But locals have long had a more irreverent name for it: the Dead Dog. It’s a blunt, pragmatic moniker that you may interpret how you wish.

Today, Tasmania’s emblem serves as more than just a cautionary tale of ecological collapse. It’s a metaphor for the looming fate of government strongholds that once seemed untouchable but are not immune to change and are now on the brink of obsolescence. Adapt or die.

The latest example comes from the Premier’s recent announcement that Tasmania is considering the privatisation of its Land Titles Office (LTO). For many, this may seem like just another bureaucratic shuffle, a practical financial decision rather than a seismic shift. But that view underestimates the significance of what’s really happening.

For more than a century, the public sector has operated under the assumption that some functions are simply too integral to governance, too embedded in legislation, and too structurally unique to be disrupted. That they will always remain within government hands. But this assumption is increasingly flawed.

The reality is that those assumptions are crumbling, not just in Tasmania but globally. The collision of customer experience (CX) innovation with regulatory experience (RX) transformation is breaking down barriers that once separated public services from every other sector.

At its core, digital transformation has always been about two things: customer expectations and platform economics. First, customers expect fast, seamless, and intuitive experiences. Second, platforms, rather than traditional institutions, are proving to be the most scalable and efficient way to deliver those experiences.

This transformation has already reshaped industries like banking and retail, where digital services have shifted from a competitive advantage to an outright necessity. Now, the same forces are at work in public service regulation and governance. The question is no longer whether government functions can be privatised or automated. It’s which ones will go next.

If land administration, once the unchallenged custodian of property ownership records, can be handed to the private sector, what follows? What happens when technology doesn’t just assist government but begins to replace it entirely?

The very foundations of regulatory control are shifting, and with them, the notion that certain functions must always remain within government hands.

More critically, what happens when the same digital transformation principles that revolutionised customer experience (CX) in the private sector collide with regulatory experience (RX) in government? The answer is that this time, everything changes.

Governments have long sold off government business enterprises (GBEs) and deregulated industries. These were moves that were once political decisions, reversible with the right shift in policy or leadership. But today’s transformation isn’t just about privatisation; it’s about something far more fundamental.

Once a function is digitised, automated, and absorbed into platform-based service delivery, there’s no going back. The shift isn’t just political, it’s structural. In a world where technology can replace, rather than just augment, government functions, these changes are permanent.

As technology continues to penetrate the core operations of government, even the most bureaucratically fortified institutions are no longer immune to change. They aren’t just being streamlined. They are undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis.

The Digital Public Infrastructure Revolution

For decades, governments defended their monopoly over regulatory functions by arguing that complexity made privatisation unworkable. They insisted that interpreting laws and policies required human discretion, that public institutions were the only true guardians of public interest, and that no private entity could replicate the intricacies of government oversight. But the past decade has proven otherwise.

This shift isn’t just ideological, nor is it purely driven by budget pressures. What’s making it inevitable is the rapid development of digital public infrastructure (DPI); the very foundation that governments themselves have been building.

DPI consists of the core systems that enable services to be delivered at scale, seamlessly, and in real-time. It includes open banking frameworks, digital identity verification, real-time payment networks, automated compliance systems, and AI-driven regulatory enforcement. These aren’t just efficiency tools; they are structural transformations that replace traditional bureaucratic processes with digital services.

Governments around the world have been laying the groundwork for a future where regulation is no longer a slow-moving, paper-driven function but a real-time, automated process embedded into digital platforms. This is already happening in financial regulation. Once dominated by government auditors and compliance officers, financial oversight is now largely executed through automated systems that detect fraud, verify identities, and enforce regulatory policies. Many of them operated by private sector platforms rather than government agencies. The state still sets the rules, but it is no longer the sole enforcer.

In effect, governments have spent years building the systems that now make their own regulatory dominance unnecessary. This isn’t their demise. It is a profound shift. The question is no longer whether governments can privatise regulatory functions, but whether they are still needed to perform them at all.

The same pattern is emerging in planning and development approvals, where AI-driven compliance tools can assess applications against zoning laws in seconds, ensuring regulatory adherence without human intervention.

If these systems already exist and function at scale, why should a city planner spend weeks reviewing something that a platform can verify instantly?

And then there is Agentic AI, a technological leap that makes the distinction between private and public sector service delivery even more redundant. Unlike traditional automation, which simply speeds up bureaucratic processes, Agentic AI doesn’t just assist, it replaces.

These autonomous digital agents can learn from precedent, interact with applicants, process applications, and escalate exceptions with full legislative reasoning. In a regulatory environment, this means that planners, compliance officers, and certifiers would no longer be required for the bulk of routine assessments.

Governments may still set the laws, but the role of the regulator shifts from administration to oversight. The days of paper-driven bureaucracy are numbered, replaced by an era where legislation itself becomes machine-readable, enforceable in real-time by digital agents that never fatigue, never delay, and never operate beyond their mandate. Hallelujah!

The Collapse of the Three-Tier Government Model?

The impact of these shifts is not limited to service delivery. It is eroding the very structure of government itself. The federal, state, and local three-tier model was designed for a world where governance was geographically bound and administratively separate. But in an era of digital-first governance, those rigid divisions make less and less sense.

Federal and state governments are already duplicating each other’s efforts. Large-scale digital public infrastructure, such as real-time national identity verification, centralised data registries, and AI-driven policy enforcement, is collapsing the distinctions between what a federal department controls versus a state agency.

Local governments have long been the custodians of place-based regulation, but that role is shrinking as cloud-based platforms take over urban planning, business licensing, and compliance enforcement. The truth is, many of Australia’s 500+ councils no longer need dedicated IT departments, finance teams, or even in-house planning officers. These functions are increasingly outsourced, regionalised, or shared across multiple entities¹.

In theory, they could go even further. Core regulatory functions could be fully subscribed to as a service from state or federal providers, or even private platforms.

The obstacle isn’t technical feasibility. It is bureaucratic inertia. Governments still think like governments, designing systems the way they always have, failing to recognise that the strategic shift is already happening. In fairness, that’s not the planning officers job. Their focus is on delivering services, not reimagining the structures that underpin them.

Take PlanBuild Tasmania, a flagship project under the state’s Digital Strategy. Instead of rethinking how planning approvals could function in a platform-driven world, it was built as a traditional government system. It is a portal that behaves more like an alternative (to private market) ERP than a true transformational RX digital service. The process remains unchanged:

• A local government receives an application (now through a portal like PlanBuild).

• Council officers manually review the submission against planning codes.

• An internal, often slow, assessment process takes place before a decision is issued.

But what if planning approvals didn’t have to work this way at all? A true PaaS-based system would replace this rigid, council-owned process with a real-time, AI-driven compliance engine.

Development applications could be assessed instantly, flagged for review only in exceptional cases, and processed within a shared, open model that includes private-sector planning certifiers. Instead of waiting weeks for a decision, compliant applications could be approved in seconds, and critically, the function would no longer need to be owned or managed by local government (or their state custodians) at all.

Governments are still building systems for the world they are used to, not the one that is emerging. That has to change. And the most disruptive force underpinning all of this is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Platform as a Service

Governments no longer need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on massive, custom-built IT projects that take years to develop. Instead, regulatory functions can now be stood up in months, at a fraction of the cost, with full scalability and adaptability to changing laws. This means that government doesn’t just outsource services. It actually stops being the primary provider of many services altogether.

If regulatory compliance can be built into nationwide AI-driven platforms, what happens to state-based variations? If development applications can be assessed through a single intelligent regulatory engine, why should local councils have separate planning departments?

The three-tier structure of government was built on administrative necessity. But in a world where regulation is automated and delivered via platforms, that necessity no longer exists. The platforms collapse them. As citizens we don’t care. Government functions need no longer be defined by rigid jurisdictional layers but by modular, scalable digital platforms that can be accessed by any level of government, or even outsourced entirely.

For those who resist this shift, arguing that regulation should remain firmly within government hands, the market will make that decision irrelevant. The moment a private sector platform offers a faster, cheaper, and more reliable alternative to a government-run regulatory function, the public will demand it.

The question won’t be whether the government should privatise services, it will be whether it has any reason to compete at all.

Fading From Sight

The collision of CX innovation, Agentic AI, and PaaS is dismantling the very foundations of how governments regulate, approve, and enforce. Tasmania’s Dead Dog is a fitting symbol of the traditional government structures that no longer need to exist. But let’s be under no illusion that their Premier’s announcement about the possible privatisation of the state LTO is an isolated move. It is a signal of what is to come.

It is not just a shift in efficiency. It is a fundamental rethinking of what government is and what it is for.

The traditional three-tier structures of both government and technology, once rigid and distinct, are rapidly dissolving. Just as monolithic IT architectures have given way to cloud-based platforms that distribute services dynamically, the clear divisions between federal, state, and local government are fading.

Public and private service delivery are no longer separate domains; they are converging into shared, digital-first ecosystems. The old strongholds of government aren’t just being reformed. They are being redefined, and in some cases, erased entirely.

Governments that recognise this shift have the opportunity to lead the transformation, ensuring that public value, not just private profit, remains at the core of the change. But for those that don’t, including city governments and Tasmania’s state government if it treats the Land Titles Office as just another GBE sell-off, the outcome is already set. Like extinct emblems, they risk being pushed into irrelevance. Not by natural evolution, but by the momentum of change, whether it is seen as progress or not.

1. It's fascinating that, rather than consolidating local government functions, the rise of regional shared service providers across Australia is actually increasing the number of local government authorities, not reducing them.