Keg,
Dehavillanddriver is on the money. Once a defect gets written up it gets phoned then faxed through to maintenance watch. From here it is entered into a status report which all of the engineers and pilots can access in real time.
At the same time it gets electronically scanned or faxed directly to the engineering records guys. They have a team doing shift work who enter all of the aircraft logs, discrepancies and part changes. Each day they do the previous days information so the input time usually about 24 hours. I know they send out a "hit-list" every night to all the ports detailing what reports someone has forgotten to send through. The engineers in the applicable port have to get the aircraft copy, copy it and fax it through. It seems that they have a pretty good system setup for ensuring all of the information gets put into the computer system.
I beleive that the next aircraft (VH-VOU) has been in Christchurch and is being flown to Melbourne either today or tomorrow. The next one out of the factory is actually going to Pacific Blue and is ZK-PBC I think.