Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Ludwig needs to have a close look at the Booz Allen Hamilton report, because what it says is that this new system offers substantial benefits over the system it replaces. In fact, it said that the legacy system it replaced had reached the end of its life and that something new was needed. The report states that the ICS is among the better examples of Customs systems available among the developed nations.

I totally reject that this has not been a worthwhile exercise. What we saw was the development of a complex program which we acknowledged throughout would be complex in its changeover. I can say that, in the course of the development of this, we saw the events of 9-11, which threw the scrutiny of it onto security issues. When I was in the United States recently, they expressed great interest in this, because they are going down the same integrated cargo system path. In fact, the United Kingdom is looking at it as well. What the report went on to say is that this provides a foundation which can provide a leading edge for Customs in this country. What Senator Ludwig should take note of is that, from 10 October through to 8 June, we have processed just under seven million messages in the exports area and that for imports we have processed over 13½ million messages. What the report demonstrated was that—