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

I thank Senator Seselja very much for the question. On 10 April the Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, and I made this announcement, and I am very pleased to be able to advise that preliminary work is indeed already underway on the project. We are talking about the streamlining of approximately 40 payments and 38 add-ons, which is currently the structure around which we make payments to 7.3 million Australian Centrelink customers. This is ultimately a very important long-term investment in government infrastructure that will have the capacity to underpin our welfare system for a generation.

The system we have now, as many people have heard previously, is over 30 years old. It is extraordinarily expensive to maintain and it is increasingly unable to meet the requirements not just of customers but also of government. This will be one of the largest IT projects of its type in the world. We estimate that it will take about seven years to complete in total from inception to decommissioning, if you like, in terms of the current system and introducing a new system. There are three major benefits that government will achieve by making these changes. Government will be able to properly address the challenges that face Australia's welfare system; we will maximise the benefits of e-government; and we will reduce the costs of administering the system for taxpayers, which is a benefit to customers, to taxpayers and to government.

What we have is a patchwork of hundreds of different systems tacked on, added on, stuck on, pinned on—any way people could find to do it over 30 years. It is unnecessarily complex and it creates extraordinary additional red tape for customers as well. Ultimately, we expect this will pay for itself within 10 years and it will continue to deliver savings at the end of that period of construction. (Time expired)