Shearer David: Customs and Excise (Border Processing—Trade Single Window and Duties) Amendment Bill Biosecurity (Border Processing—Trade Single Window) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Customs and Excise (Border Processing—Trade Single Window and Duties) Amendment Bill Biosecurity (Border Processing—Trade Single Window) Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 20 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16935. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert):I think what we have heard there is one part of the story. It is the good part of the story. It is the part that we actually agree with. We agree with the need to streamline our Customs Service. We need to have a better system than we have at the moment. But the part that Mr Hayes left out and that Maurice Williamson went apoplectic on last night in his attempt to try to show how wonderful this is—I think he doth protest a little too much. But it is a good strategy. It is a good strategy to get out there and be on the attack rather than being on the defensive because that is where he should be. But let me start with a little more of this story. Let me flesh this out a little more than what we have at the moment. As I say it depends on how you tell the story about this Trade Single Window.We agree with this legislation arising from the Border Processing (Trade Single Window and Duties) Bill because the Customs Service and the Ministry for Primary Industries together need to have a better system than they have had. We introduced this concept when Labour was in Government. The current system is 15 years old. It is starting to get out of date. It is not up with the play. Therefore with the immense amount of importing and exporting that we have in this country these bills will minimise the transaction costs—in theory anyway. They will also help us to be in sync with the World Customs Organization and help with some of our biosecurity priorities that we want to have out there as well.What Mr Hayes and Mr Williamson did not talk about was the IT system that is going off the rails. It is going off the rails. We heard Mr Williamson stand up and say: “No it’s nothing like Novopay. No it’s nothing like INCIS. It’s completely different.” Let us have a look at this. First of all the budget itself has gone up 17 percent. It may have been flagged but it started off at $76 million and it has now gone up to nearly $90 million. That is a 17 percent increase. But the devil is in the detail because that is not the big problem with what has been going on here. The big problem is that what was promised has not been delivered. What was promised under that $90 million has not been delivered.What we have now and what Mr Hayes regretfully did not talk about was the fact that we have the old system under the Customs Service CusMod operating in parallel with the new system. He said that that is a good idea and on one level I agree with him. We do not want to have a Novopay. We chucked out Datacom and immediately had Novopay fall over. But what we do not see in the immediate future—and actually not even in the medium-term or in the long-term future—is any confidence that CusMod will be phased out as it is supposed to be. The tranche one of this funding—which we have just talked about $90 million—has not delivered what this Government was promised it would by IBM. So what has happened? I will tell you what has happened. There is a major scrap going on now between the Customs Service and IBM and IBM is not delivering what it said it would deliver on the dates that it said it would do it. This is another IT system that is going right off the rails—right off the rails.Let me tell you what the State Services Commission Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet performance improvement framework review talked about when it talked about this system. “Tranche 1” it says “will provide a Trade Single Window as well as some new Risk and Intelligence tools. The Trade Single Window seems well advanced and in many ways this is the lower risk part of [the Joint Border Management System]”—the lower risk part.What it goes on to say is that actually the big part of what this is has not been delivered. Mr Hayes could be right. Right now there could be some transactions going through but it is not doing what it should be doing which is looking out for some of that risk. It goes on to say: “It was concerning to hear that the scope for the Risk and Intelligence tools had not been finalised at the time we undertook our review …”—this was some time ago but it is still not finalised as of now—“Added to this we were advised that the main contractor was having difficulty in bedding down these new tools and although we were not able to explore this in any detail it is an issue which Customs needs to address.”This has not been addressed. This is going on and on. If you talk to anybody in and around the Customs Service—anybody who is able to talk because there is a major operation in place right now to close down and shut up anybody who wants to talk about this—or you talk among people in the IT industry who know anything about this they will 100 percent confirm that this is severely off the rails and it is not meeting either its scope of work that it promised it would do or the time in which it was supposed to do it. Right now the Customs Service is contemplating taking IBM to court to ensure that it is able to actually deliver what it said it would do in the time that it said it was going to do it. Of course this is election year and who wants another Novopay in election year? So the Customs Service has closed this right down.I do not disagree with John Hayes when he said that the Customs Service is a well-run organisation—it is—but in this case it is out of its depth. It is completely out of its depth and so is the Minister of Customs who grandstands about himself being the self-appointed expert on IT situations. I can tell you that this is well and truly out of the scope of the brand new iPad that he happened to buy the other day. This is in the big territory not the little territory.What does the State Services Commission go on to say? “There are many examples of information technology programmes having struggled or failed due to poor scope control and scope control for JBMS should be addressed as quickly as possible. The scope should be locked down and any further changes should only be agreed at the most senior level and only for absolutely essential changes.” In other words it is disagreeing with Mr Williamson’s adding on and adding on. This is what sank the INCIS 15 years ago: it kept being added on and added on.This report was from 2012 and it has not been fixed. It has not been fixed. It has not been fixed and we are now looking at a total bill for this programme of $204 million of which just $90 million is the capital expenditure. The rest of it is the operational expenditure and it is supposed to finish in 2021 except it will not. It will not be able to achieve what it said it was going to achieve at the end of tranche one. We are left in the dark about what is going to be in tranche one because the papers cannot be released but tranche two is not even ready to be implemented because it is not in any way ready to go. This is a debacle. It is something that is unfolding as we speak and the Minister is desperately trying to cover it up and keep it out of the public eye.At the centre of the problem is the core of the system around the technologies for smarter targeting of people and craft crossing our borders and that part—that most sophisticated part the part we were going to get most benefit from in this system—is nowhere near in place. You can stand up and talk about how many people and how many seconds have gone through the system—and it is only a fraction of what it should be—but right now the proper technologies that we were promised would be delivered have not been delivered the budget is out of place the old system is running alongside a new system with all the costs that are included in ensuring that the old system and new system are running side by side and there is now no date for closing down the old system. The old system is continuing on because the new system has fallen over. All of the technologies around the new system are not in place. This is a debacle that will be on the scale of Novopay and it could not happen at a better time in the middle of an election year.