NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Victor Dominello has announced his retirement from politics after 14 years in parliament, citing family health reasons.

Dominello been instrumental in transforming the NSW government by digitising state services including through the rollout of the Service NSW app and the digital driver licence.

Speaking with Information Age on Sunday afternoon, Dominello said he feels “at peace” with his decision to leave politics and believes he helped build “a framework for the future”.

“I think the biggest thing we can look back on, collectively with pride, is the uplift of digital maturity over the last three or four years in particular – the Service NSW app is foundational to that,” he said.

“Even putting the data architecture in place, and the great data analytics leadership of Dr Ian Oppermann, are pieces along the way that got us to where we are today.”

Dominello has worked closely with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) throughout his tenure in the NSW government.

He launched one of the first Australia’s Digital Pulse reports in 2016, closely supported the Data Sharing Frameworks series, and endorsed ACS’s Election Platform earlier this year.

ACS Immediate Past President, Dr Ian Oppermann, said Dominello has been “a great supporter of the work of ACS”.

“Victor Dominello has been very conscious of the role ACS has to play in the state of NSW,” Dr Oppermann said.

“I truly believe he was a pioneer as the first Minister for Customer Service and Digital in Australia. On behalf of ACS, I wish him and his family well.”

Dominello still has more than 200 days left as a state minister, adding he still has his eyes firmly on doing the job at hand before he wraps up.

He’s looking at a September launch for the first credentials to be added to the NSW Education Wallet, a digital portfolio of qualifications designed to help improve the state’s workforce mobility, and says he will continue to advocate for improving data portability long after his political work is over.

“It’s about empowering the individual to take control of their destiny, their journey, rather than empowering the state like they do in autocracies,” he told Information Age.

“I think that’s the journey we have to lead.”

Dominello said he’s always trying to understand the way technology can go wrong and be mistreated so he can avoid engineering a data-driven dystopia.

“I’ve done my best to put safety rails in place when it comes to things like AI,” he said. “We’ve now got the AI Assurance Framework, we’ve got the AI Advisory Committee – maybe the next iteration is an AI Commissioner to support the Privacy Commissioner.

“I want to make sure we’ve got safety rails, we’ve got oversight.

“People say AI is the next great existential threat so we can’t just blindly whack AI into things like medicine because what if it goes wrong?”