Speculation and uninformed comment about what is happening in the Department of Human Services with the access card project was rife at the Smart Card Summit yesterday.Some senior executives who spent a good part of the summer organising corporate partnerships and tender submissions even spoke with resigned acceptance about the project being effectively dead for the foreseeable future.Some card industry companies have been working with government on smart card issues for many years and are now listening to their third minister talk about how committed the government is to the project.The new minister Chris Ellison spoke at length about the need for consultation and in particular pointed out a number of times that talks with the states about the project were still ongoing.This was very different language to what previous minister Joe Hockey told the 2006 Smart Cards Summit. Hockey laid out an ambitious timetable that put the tendering ahead of the bill's passage through the parliament.Public consultation under Hockey's approach was to be completed around the timetable and in no way was to impact upon it. Now Ellison is saying the project needs a credible consultation process to work politically and is prepared to keep shifting the implementation timetable back in order to achieve that.