Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, , 6:54:12 to 6:58:31
Officials discuss the $12.4 million IT build required to implement the new ballot system for Working Holiday Maker visas, focusing on system releases scheduled for November and the recruitment of contractors for software engineering.
Topics: Employment, Government IT systems
Speakers: Hon Jonathon Duniam, Tiali Goodchild, Elissa Walker, Stephanie Foster
So I was just trying to get an understanding. So we're under well just on a month before operation of this scheme. And we've allocated 12.9 million dollars in May to stand this scheme up and have the capacity to deliver it in whatever way. So I'm still uh seeking to understand what has happened, how much has been spent and you know and Ms.
Goodchild is here to assist you.
Excellent, Ms. Goodchild.
Hello, Senator Tialy Goodchild First Assistant Secretary Skilled and Temporary and Capability Division. Um I am not sure if my IT colleagues are coming up, but uh when Ms. Byrd and um referred to the work that Mr. Kylie's division does and the policy, my division does the delivery implementation side of it with my colleagues in IT.
Excellent.
So in terms of your other question earlier around how far we are. So there's 12.4 million that has been made for the IT build, 12.9 million included the 500 um thousand dollars for communication as well, which will be key to these measures.
So who are we communicating with?
To the Australian public and the backpackers and everyone so that they'll understand the program as it develops and industry and okay.
We'll come back to that. But so the 12.4, what have we spent so far and what have we got for us? And are we on track?
Um so I can talk a little bit to that, and then my colleague Miss Walker can as well. Um so yes, we are on track. We're obviously working with our industry stakeholders on the development of what the ballot will be the final product of, but we are working, there are already ballots in place for a number of countries, so we are working to um add in another two countries. The Minister um referred to that as well, so Indonesia and Philippines, and that's on track as well. So we have a number of scheduled system releases regularly. Um and they are on track for that November release, and then we are also building within our immigration systems the capability to do the ballots um on a broader sense. So there's two we don't have that capability for working holiday maker two or three as such, so we're building that at the moment, and that is on track.
So and my question earlier was how many people have been employed? We talked about recruitment, we talked about contractors, how many people have been enlisted in this task as part of the twelve point four million dollar uh piece of work to get us ready by the November launch date of this new ballot program for working holiday makers.
We'll still need to take the exact number on quite on notice. Um I'll need to get that for you.
Um look, I'm just mildly concerned. So we're we're a month out from end date. We're five months from the budget uh provision being set aside for this purpose. And um I don't have any detail about how many people have been engaged, even in rough terms. We're talking about designing something not purchasing uh uh equipment or anything like that. We're just literally designing some sort of software, are we, or redesigning something that we have? I I just what can you tell me about how we're spending twelve point four million dollars to do this fairly straightforward task and have had half a year to do so?
Yep, so the migration reform program has a number of a number of changes within it. Within my tech group, I have lots of people that are working on those on different projects um delivering different things. The money that we get given for these types of changes from a system perspective involve a number of tasks. They involve uh designing the system, uh working with our colleagues in immigration to make sure that it meets the requirements of the policy and the business needs. Um then the team do all the normal things that a software engineering group would do. We have to develop it, we have to code it, we have to test it, we have to do user acceptance testing, we have to make sure that it's all working, and then we deploy it. As uh Ms. Goodchild said, we have lots of standard releases through a year where we implement various changes um for migration. Um and so the ones that we're talking about, we're talking about for our next release in November.