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Australia may face Y2K bug when business gets back to normal

SYDNEY: Australia will face its first real test of the Millennium bug when most businesses return to work on Tuesday.

Senator Ian Campbell, parliamentary secretary responsible for the national Y2K-bug response, said Monday more glitches in computer software unable to differentiate between the year 2000 and 1900 were likely to come to light.

"I expect that because there'll be a lot more systems brought into play that the likelihood of Y2K events are certainly much greater than they've been," Senator Campbell said.

"The full picture will take some days and weeks to come out and I expect that the generally perceived wisdom at the moment that all the other countries in the world that didn't spend any money have gone okay is actually wrong."

He rejected the opinion of British information technology expert Professor Antony Finkelstein that the 600 billion dollar worldwide price tag for Y2K-bug preparations had been partly the product of a con and greed.

"That's a churlish line. I would say there's almost none of that," Senator Campbell said.

Finkelstein, head of software systems engineering at University College London, described government and business response to the millennium bug threat as a panic.

"There's an element of people being taken advantage of. I think that's not really the story," he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

"The story is of a panic that spiralled out of the control of all the parties, even those who sought to make money from it. "I believe greed was an element of it." Prof. Finkelstein questioned whether Y2K had created problems anywhere in the world.

"If you look at reports that are coming in from areas that were signalled as being so-called danger areas Ñ in other words, areas outside the Anglo-Saxon world where much less attention was paid to Y2K Ñ we've really not seen anything approaching a problem," he said.

"In the end, there has been a lot of unnecessary hype and panic and people have been induced to spend money on precautions which I believe were wholly unnecessary."

To date, the only Y2K snags reported in Australian were malfunctions in bus ticket validators in Hobart and Adelaide. AFP