Warning! This rant contains course language and negative views of the Australian government.

I hate complications. I fucking hate complications. All I want to do is register for GST. So where does this rant come from? Read on!

Not long ago (meaning several minutes/hours ago) I tried to register for GST (some tax we have in Australia – read: it sucks balls) so I could finalise my registration with Apple and iTunes Connect as I’m registering to have the ability to charge for iPhone apps I’ll be writing in the near future. How hard can it be?

Oh boy…

So once I finally found the website I was looking for I was prompted that because the website only supports Internet Exploder and Netscape (fun!) and that the website probably won’t work in my browser (I’m running Safari 5). I’m already dreading how fucking backwards this website is. One: who uses Netscape? Two: who still uses Netscape? Three: who the fuck still uses Netscape? It’s midway through 2010 (not 2003), surely government websites should have some sort of support for modern browsers that are used by normal people.

I find the GST application link and click on it – I immediately get pulled into some shitty .ashx (some variation on ASP.NET, of which I’ve never seen before) which prompts me with a JavaScript alert with the message:

A keystore error has occurred with a result code of 4003.
null

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Has anyone enlisted to do government websites ever looked into QA? Have they ever learnt about writing error messages that mean something to the general public who actually have to use this fucking stupid system made by the “D” students of some primary school programming class. Still, the fun continues…

CERTIFICATES AND REQUIRED SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS…

Yeah, I now have to try and register for some shitty global authentication system called AUSkey (sounds just like our butt-fucked mess, myki) and to top it off, I also have to download a digital certificate! I first start out by trying to get an AUSkey. This starts off fine, I fill out all sorts of information and it seems to be alright but OH NO! I have to ring up some 1300 number (which is very costly) to provide them “with more information” (I smell bullshit…)

So I’ve just wasted about 5 minutes of my time so far, now it’s time to waste even more of it! Since the first option (AUSkey) failed to provide an immediate solution, I decided to try option two (ATO digital certificate). After downloading a disk image, I open it up to find a package installer which requires me to close all browsers (ugh). After install I re-open Safari and try authenticate myself in the system. It fails. Fuck this, I restart… OH WHAT A FREAKING SURPRISE, IT STILL DOESN’T WORK.

So now, I sit here with no GST paperwork done and (another) useless government website wasting my time, bandwidth and HDD storage space.

If there’s one thing to take away from this rant its that the Australian government services are unreliable and they should spend much more time investing in services that reach all consumers and less time on the National Broadband Network and our kiddy pr0n filter (which won’t work).

Love

Dan xx