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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-10-19 Daily Xml
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Question Time

Driver's Licence Replacement Fee

Ms SAVVAS (Newland) (14:26): My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport. Can the minister update the house on the government's initiative to waive the driver's licence replacement fee for South Australians affected by the Optus breach?

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:26): It's an important question and the breach of the private information stored by Optus has shocked our nation and shocked the people who are customers of Optus. Why Optus decided to keep information that was that confidential and that dangerous unsecured on their servers is beyond belief and of course there is an ongoing commonwealth investigation into that.

Among the information captured was one of the most important pieces of identification most South Australians carry, which is a driver's licence. It has your date of birth, it has your photograph, it has your home address, it has a unique identifying number and your signature, and that being compromised can lead to all sorts of dangerous implications for identity theft. Identify theft can be expensive, it can be stressful, it can be traumatising and it can have long-term financial consequences, so it was important that the government acted quickly and swiftly and we did.

The first thing we did was waive the fee for driver's licence replacement. On average, we were doing about 200 of these a year and we have done thousands in a short period of time. I want to take this time to thank the hardworking public servants of the South Australian government who went above and beyond. We called for volunteers to assist, and they turned up. They worked as hard as they possibly could to make this as quick and efficient as possible for South Australians.

It didn't always go well; there were still queues and for that we apologise, but we attempted to do hundreds of years' worth of work in days. I want to read some of the positive feedback we received. The first one is from the centre at Modbury, which was scheduled for closure by the previous government but which we kept open. One person said:

A huge thank you to the staff at Modbury. I visited last week and, although the line was huge, it was an uncomplicated process and they were a pleasure to deal with, which was a breath of fresh air considering the stress caused by Optus.

Another person at Port Adelaide said:

Port Adelaide is very busy but flowing beautifully—nice and fast. Well done to Service SA staff for handling this so efficiently.

At Gawler:

Well done to Service SA Gawler, had Optus affected people in and out in around 20 minutes. Made it super easy and stress free for everyone.

Since starting waiving the fee there have now been 90,000 licence replacements. Considering that on average we process between 200 and 300 per year, Service SA staff processed a century's worth of licence replacements in just eight days—in eight days—and has now processed three centuries' worth of licence replacements. That is no easy feat and it translates to hours and hours of additional work. The breach occurred just before the school holidays so we had Service SA staff voluntarily cancelling their leave to work extra hours.

The first week after we introduced the fee waiver, SA branches operated at extended hours to manage the demand. In total, an extra 240 hours were collectively worked by Service SA staff. Of course, this is unsustainable. It was only a temporary measure while another solution could be developed. The following week, the department added the capacity to claim the fee waiver over the internet by using sa.gov, which was an incredibly important implementation.

We have also received extra feedback since then and I want to read one more review: 'Excellent. That only took [a] few seconds to do. I never had time to make it to a Service SA [centre] because of work.' Common sense prevailed. I want to thank again the Department for Infrastructure and Transport for their exceptional work and our commitment to keeping face-to-face Service SA centres open.

The SPEAKER: Before I call the member for Hartley, I also take this opportunity to thank Frances at the Mount Barker Service SA, who replaced my own licence.

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