Motor Vehicle Registrations

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (15:05): My question is directed to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Minister, can you advise the house on the number of online motor vehicle registration renewals that have been taken since its introduction?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Minister for Housing and Urban Development) (15:06): I thank the member for Ashford for her question. Online vehicle registration was introduced in 1998 and since that time has become a very popular choice for motorists and other vehicle owners to renew their registration. It's an important option for people as it saves the time and cost of presenting themselves either to a Service SA centre or to a post office, for example.

Understandably, initially the take-up of this online service was very slow. Internet use back then was not as prolific as it is today. The impacts and benefits of the internet, and indeed of information technology, were not widely appreciated throughout the community. In fact, I think we used to have a minister for Y2K compliance back in those heady days. Connection speeds were also slower, and some of the browsers that existed back then don't even exist anymore—AltaVista and Netscape come to mind.

In the first year of that online service, there were about 1,700 online motor vehicle registration renewals. Four years later, this figure had grown to nearly 85,000 South Australians who had visited the EzyReg portal and renewed their vehicle registration. The success of this initiative continued to grow. Another four years later, by 2006, 458,000 registration renewals had been undertaken via the internet, and another four years on nearly 1.1 million people registered their vehicles online.

In 2011, the EzyReg smartphone app was introduced as a further option for the public. In 2011, nearly 20,000 registration renewals were processed via the smartphone application. In 2015, I am pleased to say a record number of South Australians used the EzyReg website and app to register their vehicles. There were over two million transactions on EzyReg. Further to this, in that same year, the approximate percentage of registration renewals paid through each delivery channel was 70 per cent by EzyReg, 16 per cent by Australia Post and 14 per cent by Service SA.

Over half a million South Australians registered their vehicles via their smartphones and over 1.5 million via other online channels. Since online renewals were introduced in 1998, as at 22 August of this year there have been over 14½ million online registration renewals. I am pleased to say that further to this the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure is currently working to make additional transactions available to the public through the EzyReg system, and I look forward to providing the house with further details of their success in the near future.

Overall, the total number, in 2015, of online transactions across all forms of business with Service SA customers, beyond registration renewals, was 3.9 million, and these overall figures don't just include vehicle registrations. They include other interactions with EzyReg for other purposes for other types of vehicles.

We recognise that the shift to online services creates not just a great deal more convenience for people interacting with government but there are also much greater opportunities. Not only have we rolled out successfully the Addinsight app to assist people to navigate their way around metropolitan Adelaide but also we are looking at the Metro Mate application to assist public transport users and putting licences online as well.