Points of Order — Parliamentary ICT System—Outages

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I want to raise with you a matter that you are not directly responsible for, but it does have an impact on this House and, in particular, on question time. For the last 24 hours or so, I understand that around 50 percent of the parliamentary complex has been unable to access the parliamentary system. This has caused a significant disruption not only for parties in Parliament but also for the Clerk’s office and the Parliamentary Library, which have been reduced to handwriting out advice and hand-delivering it to some members. Although we all understand that ICT outages occur from time to time, it is quite clear that there is not any redundancy in the system. Once it goes down, it is down, and the way we run Parliament nowadays means that we are utterly reliant upon our technology. I would just ask, Mr Speaker, whether you could do whatever you can to ensure that the system continues to run in a way that we would like it to.

I thank the member for his point, and I certainly also share the member’s frustration. I have met with the general manager on two occasions this morning. I have met with the ICT manager once this morning. I am aware that a particular switching mechanism collapsed, and it has taken some time to fix it. I have asked for a substantive report to be available to present to the Business Committee, because it is a matter of order for this House, and also for a report to be presented on ways of remedying any further issues. That will be available for the Parliamentary Service Commission when it first meets.