Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

That is record keeping under the previous government, Senator. It will reduce the fragmentation of information, data and systems. It will ensure that all of our systems are responsive to our changing business needs and will therefore improve our decision making by giving clearer operating instructions and appropriate decision support tools. The beneficiaries of this will of course be DIMA’s clients and also the departmental staff, who will be given the tools to enable them to do the job. This will cost $341 million in operating costs over four years and $153 million in capital over four years, coming to nearly $500 million.

The parliamentary secretary announced yesterday that DIMA has selected an IBM led consortium as the preferred partner. We expect that portals in DIMA’s business areas of border security, case management, compliance, working holiday makers and work and holiday visas to be the first to be brought online. They will enable a single view of the full records for someone associated with those areas. This will take some time but, as I indicated when the Palmer report came out, and then when the Comrie-Ombudsman report came out, the government is taking the opportunity to reform the whole department—not simply some areas that have been referred to in those reports. This is an example of our commitment to do that.