This year budget web site worked fine at 80:06pm and kept working (in 2010 the system failed at 7:53pm, reporting: "HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found").
QUALITY OF THE WEB PAGE
Each year from 1996 to 2006 the budget web site got better. But by 2007-08 seemed to reached a stable design, also used for 2009/2010, 2010/2011 and 2011/2013. The site is in the same HTML 4.01 Transitional, as the last two years and has not been changed to XHTML, or HTML 5, as used for newer web sites. The code is clean and efficient.
As happened last year, the home page failed a W3C HTML Markup Validation test, with 4 errors. These are minor ones and the same number as last three years.
The home page scored a poor 45% W3C mobileOK Checker, but up from a very poor 29% last ear and better than 35% the year before. This is unfortunate, given the increase in the use of smart phones and tablet computers in the last year. The page has 101 kbytes of images and only 8kbytes of text. The size of images should be reduced.
The budget home page failed a TAW automated accessibility test, with 14 Level A problems (WCAG 2.0):
7 Problems in 6 success criteria
Corrections are needed
Perceivable 3
As with the last two years, important tables in the overview are provided as blurry image files, while the detailed documents have better formatted HTML tables and PDF. One problem is that the HTML and PDF versions are offered alongside, with the HTML lined from the title of the document, and the PDF version labeled with the file size. The PDF version is not labeled "PDF". The PDF version of the overview is a relatively modest 2.3MB 48 page document. The Budget is now released under a Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia license, in line with open access government policy.
IT IN THE BUDGET
The budget search service responded promptly. References to "Information Technology" were up from 5 last year, to 6 (well below the peak of 15 the year before):
- Budget Strategy and Outlook - Budget Paper No. 1 - Statement 8: Statement of Risks - Fiscal Risks
Home. Purchase. Budget FAQ. Help. Search. Budget Speech. Budget at a Glance. Budget Overview. Budget Paper No.1. Budget Paper No.2. Budget Paper No.3. Budget Paper No.4. Appropriation Bills. Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Final Budget Outcome. Portfolio Budget Statements. … - 2012–13 Commonwealth Budget - Social Overview - Delivering a Stronger, Fairer Future
Historic first stage of a National Disability Insurance Scheme The right support for the long–term. Matt relies on a wheelchair to move around. His house needs minor modifications to make it wheelchair accessible, but he has been unable to get funding for these modifications. As a result, whenever … - Budget Measures 2012-13 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Treasury
Home. Purchase. Budget FAQ. Help. Search. Budget Speech. Budget at a Glance. Budget Overview. Budget Paper No.1. Budget Paper No.2. Budget Paper No.3. Budget Paper No.4. Appropriation Bills. Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Final Budget Outcome. Portfolio Budget Statements. … - Budget Measures 2012-13 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities
Home. Purchase. Budget FAQ. Help. Search. Budget Speech. Budget at a Glance. Budget Overview. Budget Paper No.1. Budget Paper No.2. Budget Paper No.3. Budget Paper No.4. Appropriation Bills. Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Final Budget Outcome. Portfolio Budget Statements. … - Budget Strategy and Outlook - Budget Paper No. 1 - Statement 6: Expenses and Net Captial Investment - Overview (continued)
Home. Purchase. Budget FAQ. Help. Search. Budget Speech. Budget at a Glance. Budget Overview. Budget Paper No.1. Budget Paper No.2. Budget Paper No.3. Budget Paper No.4. Appropriation Bills. Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Final Budget Outcome. Portfolio Budget Statements. … - Budget Measures 2012-13 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs
Home. Purchase. Budget FAQ. Help. Search. Budget Speech. Budget at a Glance. Budget Overview. Budget Paper No.1. Budget Paper No.2. Budget Paper No.3. Budget Paper No.4. Appropriation Bills. Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Final Budget Outcome. Portfolio Budget Statements. …
The "National Broadband Network" continues to dominate government thinking on IT, with 24 mentions (same as last year) in the budget papers.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is likely to involve significant IT expenditure. It will be challenging to have IT system read for the launch date of July 2013.
The e‐Health project will receive a relatively modest $233.7 M, with $161.6 M for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). However, funding is unlikely to be the limiting factor with this system, as significant privacy and business issues remain to be resolved with the operation of the system.
Three Australian Skills Centres of Excellence will be set up for "innovative teaching and learning methods" in vocational education. It is not clear what these centers will be, how much finding they will get, or why three are needed. The innovative teaching methods are mostly based on e-learning, and so it would make sense to have just one virtual center, which provides its output online, via the Internet, with staff and students located around Australia. It would be unfortunate if the excellent, but underfunded, work of the National Vet E-learning Strategy, was undermined by duplicating the work with three additional centers.
In school education, the government is continuing to fund computers for schools, rather than provide educational content online. There is no funding (I could see) for training of teachers in using computers for education, nor for general teacher education via e-learning. Research shows that just giving a student a computer does not improve their education. What is required is educational content on the computer and a teacher trained to use it. By failing to do this the federal government is wasting education finding.
The Budget provides a modest $54M to encourage students to do Mathematics, Engineering and Science. At the tertiary level, as at school and vocational level, the federal government appears oblivious to the e-learning revolution which is sweeping across all sectors of education. A symptom of this problem is the Government's My University website, which is supposed to showcase Australian education to the world. However, the front page of the website scores 0 out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker. The page is 50 times larger than the recommended size for a mobile web page, due to unnecessary images. The result will be that potential international students will not be able to access the website, conclude that Australia has poor Internet access and go to another country to study.
The government announced before the budget that 12 new submarines will be built in Adelaide and $214M to prepare for this. This a relatively insignificant amount in the budget, but the Future Submarine Project (SEA 1000) as currently formulated has a very low probably of success and the potential to cost many billions of dollars in the long term. Additional funding may be needed to produce a workable submarine configuration, or Australia risks having 12 submarines which are less capable than the current 6 Collins class boats. A change in approach is needed to acquisition of advanced weapons systems to acknowledge the key role of IT: a submarine is not a boat with some computers and sensors in it, in terms of cost and application it is a set of sensors and computers which happen to be enclosed in a boat.
Comments on budgets:
1996 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9608/0096.html
1997 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9705/0315.html
1998 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9805/0174.html
1999 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9905/0265.html
2000 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0005/0358.html
2002 http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0205/0318.html
2004 http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2004-May/056673.html
2005 http://www.archivum.info/link@mailman.anu.edu.au/2005-05/msg00035.html
2006 http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2006-May/066486.html
2007 http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20072008.html
2008 http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20072008.html
2009 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20092010.html
2010 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20102011.html
2011 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20112012.html
2012
MAJOR SECTIONS OF THE BUDGET
The ABC has pointed out some projects to use the NBN in the federal budget (NBN facts and fallout from the Budget, David Braue, 16 May 2012). I missed these in my IT in the Budget Summary.
ReplyDelete