Jill Bonnet

Immigration has lots of problems with finances.

Like in 2020, it was $135 million in the red.

And so, it's not unusual to have

Things going wrong there in terms of project overruns, cost overruns.

I think with this one, it was a doubling of the capital expenditure.

So what they thought was going to be 19 million in 2019, three or four years later, it already doubled to that $35 million amount that it got to.

And so I think that was the part where it wasn't clear what was going wrong.

And then there was discussion about the fallings out with the lead vendor, like the supplier.

And so.

Yeah, I think that's the thing that was kind of interesting and how it all came to command.

Yeah, it's a great worry that there aren't more journalists looking to these things and it does us all a disservice when we don't know about them and including the government and the department that would have wanted it to.

It just becomes a lot clearer when things are written in articles, in my opinion.

And in terms of journalists looking back at the same, you know, in their own round, yeah, I think that's really crucial because

Hopefully, you've got those memories of things that connects to that.

All of this connects to Migration 5, for example, the work that immigration does with the other Five Eyes countries, matching data from migrants, sharing the information that they get on them, including technology, immigration policies.

It's all in the same ballpark and you do just after a while, hopefully if you have a great round like I'm lucky to, that you do just really enjoy finding out more and putting in those information requests and hopefully finding out what other people would rather you didn't know.

Yeah, I think that's the big question, isn't it?

Because the minister says that $30 million has been wasted.

But there will have been a lot of work that's gone into it that presumably can still be used in some other way.

So we would hope so because that's a lot of taxpayer money to go down the Google and search.