When are Australian departure cards going to be phased out?

When are Australian departure cards going to be phased out?

There is nothing more frustrating than going on the family holiday, filling in 4 of these cards then binning them just after passport control. I remember hearing that they are due to phased out, is this correct?

I recentlywondered about this upon using the automatic passport scanning machines at SYD on a family trip. However placing them in the marked box is unlikely to be 'binning them'. The data on the cards was never, AFAIK, captured by the immigration officers who examined your passport.. I expect that they are all fed through OCR machines, and have been for many years.

Likely next year, we're told: see Australian government considers axing airport departure cards

This is decades overdue! We must be one of the few developed countries which has this ridiculous bureacratic process, especially on departure. It's a total  joke to still be providing this information when leaving the country. 
I can totally accept the fact that we have an Arrivals card given our somewhat unique agricultural/customs declaration nature. Biomtetric passports/airline information should have all the necessary information captured in this day and age.

I have been to many developing countries where these cards were phased out many years ago.

Has anyone tried just dumping an incomplete card in the box?

I doubt the government is reconciling cards to airline manifest, to ensure completeness. Not that it would reconcile even if you wanted to, unless you apply a strick system of swapping buckets at certain time intervals to match/track airline departures, assuming outliers (i.e. people who pass through immigration in advance of the pre-defined interval cut-off) are immaterial.

But to what end? So some work experience kid at the Border Agency can record the data in a system to facilitate analysis?

Reconciling the cards is pretty easy given that they ask for the departing flight number. The question is whether the data they provide is really needed, and if so whether it can be obtained any other way.

Yes assuming date of departure is accurately recorded. But you're right, what's the purpose of finding out which state you've been in and whether you're a visitor leaving, resident leaving temporarily or leaving permanently?