No. There was no system, period. It was cardboard cards and manual record-keeping. It was a world in which people waited months, when they moved from department to department, to have their pay.
Almost everything you've seen under the Phoenix label happened in the pre-Phoenix world. It was a terrible, terrible pay environment, and there was no system. It was a reasonable thing for the previous government to do. It was the advice of senior public servants to get a 21st-century pay system in place. Obviously, we failed to do it.