Budget 2010: spending the Gershon savings

As promised, 50 per cent of savings made from business-as-usual operations at the suggestion of the Gershon Review have been ploughed back into tech projects.

A total of $113.6 million will go towards the development of 41 ICT projects over the next four years in the aim to improve agency efficiency.

Some of the projects include:

• $11.9 million over three years for the Federal Government's whole-of-government datacentre strategy. Ongoing administration costs of the strategy from 2013/14 will be met by agencies. The government believes it will save $1 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by implementing the strategy.
• $40 million of the funding required for an over $100 million Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade passport system revamp to meet increased passport demand and improve security and fraud prevention.
• An undisclosed amount for a Central Budget Management system to underpin the financial management of the government and provide accurate information — the amount was not disclosed due to commercial confidentiality.
• $5.1 million on new datacentres for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
• $14.7 million for virtualisation in Centrelink, and $8 million for providing shared services to its new sister Human Services agencies.
• $0.9 million to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for an identity life cycle management system and $0.8 million on thin client for regional and rural sites.
• $3.4 million in total to the Bureau of Meteorology to build an Australian data archive of common software architecture, to hold a virtualisation project and to upgrade business systems.
• $2.9 million to invest in storage facilities for Geoscience Australia.
• $5.6 million for Medicare to enhance pathology claims and remove hard coding from medical assessing.

The projects were expected to deliver $1.7 million in savings to the budget via efficiencies.

(Front page image credit: Australia Dollars image by InfoMofo, CCBY-SA 2.0)