Mr. Barry Lowry:

I thank the Senator for his question. I will clarify the printing situation first of all. We are very much governed, obviously, by the sheer weight of printing required. Revenue is currently working on a time slot of 70,000 to 90,000 per day. Revenue has other printing commitments. It stepped in at the eleventh hour to help with this so it just depends on what other work is on. The 160,000 Ms Canavan referred to was the work of Saturday and Sunday. The hours have been extended to give the maximum throughput so as many people as possible can get their certificate if they need it posted by 19 July or very shortly thereafter.

The approach we took to email is slightly different. We are using the Amazon Web Services, AWS, fast email relay service but because of concerns about spam there is a need to choke the output, as we call it. In other words it is done in a very measured way. Last night we sent out the first 12,000 and we carefully checked everything worked. Then this morning we started ramping up. By close of play today, all being well, we will have sent out 750,000 and then overnight we will send out the remainder. Thus by around lunchtime tomorrow we should have 1 million emails sent. I should add we are expecting about 1% of the those emails to fail and bounce back simply because the person did not put in the right email address when they registered through the portal or he or she has changed his or her email address since then. We then need to collect those emails and review them. We are looking at a process about how we can ensure that where that fails, the person knows about it and we can fix that.