Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Ruston for that question. This is an issue which has been discussed recently both in estimates and elsewhere. We are running an ICT payment system in the Department of Human Services, which is now more than 30 years old. It was, in fact, built in the early 1980s. Some of us in the chamber can still remember those days. I think Mr Hawke was Prime Minister; the late, great Peter Brock was winning at Bathurst; and—it was a very long time ago—the Parramatta Eels won a premiership.

The system originally delivered $10 billion worth of payments to around 2.5 million people, but it has become a critical piece of government infrastructure that is now responsible for delivering payments of about $100 billion to 7.3 million people each year. That equates to about $12 million every hour. The system is stable and it is reliable, but it does not have the sort of flexibility and longevity that we need in that particular system.

To meet today's needs, the original system has been repeatedly upgraded and extended, I am advised, over 350 times. What we now have is a web of interconnected systems with add-ons and attachments. A simple update, for example, often requires changes to many different parts of the system. So if you want to make much-needed policy changes they can, through the ICT process, take a number of months to implement.

We have a very highly skilled and committed team of ICT experts who work in this area in human services. In fact, it speaks for itself when I say that some of them as individuals have actually worked on this same system for more than two decades. But there are very few organisations around the world that still use this type of computer system, and that makes attracting appropriately skilled staff—some of the few who are still familiar with that system—quite difficult, and retaining them is also a significant challenge.