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Election halts parliament IT reform

Members of Parliament will have to wait for departments to consolidate their handling of IT support for Parliament House and electorate offices after it was revealed that "legislative issues" have pushed the project back until after the federal election.
Written by Ben Grubb, Contributor

Members of Parliament will have to wait for departments to consolidate their handling of IT support for Parliament House and electorate offices after it was revealed that "legislative issues" have pushed the project back until after the federal election.

According to Department of Parliamentary Services' deputy secretary, David Kenny, there are currently four organisations involved in supporting parliamentary IT services. "That is us, the two chamber departments and the Department of Finance and Deregulation," he told a Federal Budget estimates hearing on Monday last week.

The idea behind the reform is to transfer the role of IT services to fewer departments, meaning Members of Parliament would know exactly where to go for help. Kenny said there was a "generally held view" that parliament did not need so many departments managing its support, and that it could "work very well with fewer parties involved".

The proposed support consolidation was initiated after the Special Minister of State agreed on 19 October 2008 to form a working group between the Department of Finance and Deregulation and the Department of Parliamentary Services. Yet, Kenny said he had only just heard from the Department of Finance that the federal election would delay the reform.

"This morning was the first time that I had been aware that there had been an issue in anybody's thinking relating to the election," Kenny told the hearing last week.

"I have not had a conversation with the Finance people about this development, because this email came in while we were sitting here this morning."

Part of the email from Finance to Kenny read: "Finance does not consider it likely that any transfer would occur before the next election".

Last February, Kenny told the committee that it was hoped that the work would be completed, agreed and approved in time for a transfer by the end of June.

"In discussions I had with Finance officers it was fairly widely acknowledged that a transfer, or an action date, by 30 June was what we would work towards," Kenny said.

Part of the delay could have been due to recent structural changes within the Department of Finance and Regulation.

The Department of Finance and Deregulation's first assistant secretary, financial and e-solutions group, Michael Burton, confirmed the change of management. Burton said the issues causing the delay had been legislative: electorate office IT is funded from a special pot of money that has certain ways of being administered, while the IT for the Australian Parliament House is funded via departments.

There were steps the Department of Finance and Deregulation were taking, Burton said, but the departments "did not want to undertake the actual transfer before the election [and] go through a lot of change during what will be a very busy period".

"Rather, we will leave the current services in place. They are what senators and members and their electorate office staff are used to using," Burton said.

Burton's department was "keen" to make the transfer work, he said, as it was "not effective for senators and members to have to refer to multiple help desks and sources of expertise in order to get IT issues solved". However, he couldn't give a timeline for when politicians could expect a single help desk and service delivery.

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