Government Wasting Tax Payer Funds, Front Running, Creating Confusion and Encouraging Scam Websites

Seems like someone at the Government level has just BULK applied for all their .au tokens for both uncontested and more importantly all the contested names for direct .au domains that are under any Government domain extension such as:
.gov.au
.act.au
.vic.au
etc…

This could not have been done by each department, under each State individually as all application have hit at the same time. This to us seems like a breach of the Registrar agreement where each Registrant needs to specifically and individually agree and apply for a token. I doubt that every single State and different levels of departments would have been consulted, let alone aware of their application for direct au was done on their behalf all at the same time.



As you can see the Government has just wasted substantial amount of Tax Payer funds by paying auDA/Afilias MULTIPLE application fees for the .au rights from all departments. The above example shows 8 different government departments applied. Assuming the cost is $10 each that is $80 wasted, and this was done on thousands of different domains.

Secondly this mass application in our opinion this is FRONT RUNNING, where the Government has used their Registrar to mass apply for valuable domain names and lock them, forcing other applicants to also Apply and then try to deal with each Government department to buy their rights. How is the com.au, net.au, org.au holder going to negotiate with a Government department to buy their .au rights from them? It is hard enough for a .com.au and .net.au holders to reach a deal, if you have ever tried dealing with a Government department, good luck plus they are using TAX PAYER Funds so hardly fair, to do this is highly unethical if not illegal.

This we feel is a total waste of tax payer funds, applying for thousands of .au domain names that they will:

NEVER USE
but worse will:
CREATE MASS CONFUSION
and even worse will:
ENCOURAGE SCAM SITES

Currently everyone can trust any Government site as it ends with gov.au so a visitor is 100% confident that they are dealing with the right department and website.

If any department launches a site on such as ato.au or tax.au end users will not know that this is legitimate, this will create doubt and will open the whole space up to potential scam sites pretending to be government departments, now that they have set a precedent that they also use .au sites.

This is just wrong and should not be allowed! The security and safety of the .au namespace is at stake.