Concerns about digital switch at Vet dept

A recent string of government IT dramas has Labor concerned about the proposed shift to online processing at the Department of Veterans' Affairs.

While it supports a bill aimed at streamlining and improving services for veterans and their families, the opposition told parliament it doesn't want a repeat of issues linked to Centrelink's automated debt recovery system, the 2016 Census failure and outages at the Australian Taxation Office.

"You've seen it with the ABS, you've seen it with Centrelink, you've seen it with the ATO ... now we're worried that it could happen with DVA," Labor frontbencher Ed Husic told MPs on Thursday.