ACS 2016 Federal Election Manifesto

The Australian Computer Society (which I am a member of) has published a 17 page "ACS 2016 Federal Election Manifesto", covering five key areas: 1. Digital skills and digital literacy, 2. Diversity, 3. Cyber security, 4. NBN and 5. Policy framework. Some Comments on the proposals:

1. Digital skills and digital literacy: The ACS proposes training teachers and educational techniques to support new skills for students. This is something I have spent the last four years doing, leaning how to teach about IT, using IT. This might involve some politically unpalatable changes to education, such as increasing class sizes and involving parents more in the eduction of their children.
2. Diversity: Increasing diversity in the workforce, I suggest starts with providing education opportunity. In particular, providing more support for schooling, vocational and university education on-line will allow those who would otherwise be excluded to take part.
3. Cyber security: The ACS is making bold claim that cyber security is the "... biggest single threat to Australia fully capturing the opportunities of the information age ...". I suggest that while cyber security is important, education is a bigger issue.
4. NBN: The ACS argues for high-quality and pervasive broadband, which I agree with. However, I think it is time to retire the term "NBN".
5. Policy framework: ACS suggests a collaborative, open approach to national policy development. Unfortunately I can't see party politics ending any time soon. As a result I suggest it is up to bodies such as ACS to provide the open collaborative forums for policy development.

IT matters of interest in the 2016/2017 Federal Budget

From 1996, when the Australian budget was first put on-line, to 2015, I produced a summary of IT related items. This year the Australian Computer Society sponsored a "Budget Insider 2016", so I have not produced my own summary. However, here are some brief comments:

The governments' Youth Jobs PaTH for pre-employment skills training sounds worthwhile. However the government needs to put in place effective measures to prevent fraud in the system, as has happened with the VET-HELP scheme (with several billion dollars lost).

What is not mentioned on education in the budget is how to manage the transformation from classroom to on-line. If Australian institutions do not make this change in the next five to ten years, the current education export industry will collapse and become an education services deficit of about $25B per year. To help prevent that I have prepared a proposal for a train-the-trainer program on Entrepreneurial Skills and Digital Technology. I plan to present this at an international computer education conference later in the year.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is unlikely to be any more successful than the NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) it replaces, in adoption of the e-Health records. After expenditure of more than a billion dollars there is little to show. The project should be abandoned and rethought: What is the government trying to accomplish? How best can it be done? Who has succeeded at this elsewhere?

The Digital Transformation Office (DTO) has been given some more time to prove itself. But I suggest that if it does not start producing some tangible results in the next year, it should, and will, be scrapped.

Australia's Digital Pulse

Greetings from the National Press Club in Canberra, where Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications, is speaking at the launch of "Australia's Digital Pulse". This eighty page report was prepared for the Australian Computer Society (ACS) by Deloitte.

Brenda Aynsley, ACS President, said we need a deeper pool of ICT professionals and a focus on STEM skills in classrooms.

The report was prepared by Dr Ric Simes and John O’Mahony at Deloitte Access Economics. As well as the full report the key findings are available.

One point made by the authors is that while ICT is important to the economy and there are plenty of ICT jobs, the enrollments in ICT at Australian universities is declining. Australia is now importing many more ICT professionals than it is graduating at its own universities. The mining sector diverted students from ICT to other industries. Also the perception is that ICT degrees are for geeks, not cool digital business people. Also the current boom in the ICT industry is not as visible as the mining boom.

The authors also warned of a digital divide at schools, with a few who are literate and many who are not. Computer studies at Australian schools are also declining.  A national curriculum of digital technologies is being introduced but I notice that NSW appears not to be prompt to implement it (a topic for a future ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group in Canberra).

The Minister said he was excited by the digital revolution, including the additional hotel rooms being provided in Sydney without any new buildings, due to Internet booking. The minister urged Australia to embrace the volatility due to the Internet. Perhaps Australian government agents will use digital currency to buy off people smugglers in the Arafura Sea ;-)

More seriously, the Minister asked why female participation in the ICT industry is decreasing.He suggested joking that some culture change to the stereotypical pizza eating caffeine drinking male computer nerd.

I did a quick search of the report and found that "Massive Open Online Course" (MOOC) gets a mention, but no other forms of open access to education. The report appears to cover many of the same issues in the "#SMARTer2030: ICT Solutions for 21 st Century Challenges" by Accenture for GeSI (2015).

"Digital technologies is one of the fastest growing parts of Australia’s economy with its economic contribution growing from $50 billion in 2011 to $79 billion in 2013-14.
Deloitte Access Economics and the Australian Computer Society Australia’s have partnered to produce Australia's Digital Pulse which examines how digital disruption is dramatically changing industries and occupations across the economy.
The report found there has been 5% growth in the number of ICT professionals, with an increase to 600,000 ICT workers in 2014, and demand for a further 100,000 workers over the next six years. Despite the demand, the number of graduates with ICT qualifications has declined significantly since the early 2000s.

The report shows that Australia needs a workforce that is equipped with the ICT skills necessary to fuel its digitally-driven economic growth. This creates an enormous opportunity for students considering a career in ICT.

Key findings

• Employment in the ICT sector is expected to grow by 2.5% per year over the next six years to 2020. Compared to employment for the economy as a whole, which is forecast to grow by 1.6%
• The gender pay gap in ICT stands at 20%, significantly lower than the workforce average of 34%
• 47% of all workers who studied ICT are now in other professions, such as advertising, marketing or accounting
• 43% of workers in ICT occupations studied courses other than ICT or engineering, such as commerce and management degrees
• 52% of ICT workers are in industries outside ICT itself including professional services, public administration and financial services
• The highest growth rate in demand for ICT qualifications is forecast for postgraduates, with demand forecast to grow at 4.2% annually over the six years to 2020."

IT matters of interest in the 2015/2016 Federal Budget

Just about every year since the Australian Federal Budget was first put on the web, I have done a quick search though the documents to find matters of interest in information technology.

IT IN THE BUDGET

The budget search service failed at 10:30pm, reporting "A software error has occurred.". So I used Google to search for "Information Technology", finding seven results (up from four in 2014/2015):

Budget 2015 - Protecting Australia

"The new measures include $296 million to strengthen the capabilities of our intelligence agencies, including updating information technology systems. ...
New legislation requires telecommunication companies to retain metadata for two years. We are providing $131 million to assist the telecommunications industry to upgrade its systems to implement this policy." (Repeated in PDF version of "Protecting Australia - Budget").

Metadata ...Budget 2015 - Overview - Fairness of benefits

"We will invest an initial $60 million to kick start the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation to upgrade the Department of Human Services’ (DHS) information technology to meet the demands of today’s digital world." (repeated in PDF version of "Overview - Budget").

Defence Housing Australia — reform

"The Government will provide $4.0 million over two years from 2015‑16 to undertake a reform of Defence Housing Australia (DHA). This will include a review of DHA's accounting, information technology and business reporting systems to improve transparency of the cost of providing DHA's services, as well as a review of DHA's business plans to support the sustainable delivery of quality and accessible housing and accommodation services. "

Part 3: Capital Measures
Table 3: Capital measures since the 2014-15 MYEFO

Information technology security enhancements for Parliamentarians $6.0M

Information technology security enhancements for Parliamentarians

"The Government will provide $12.9 million over four years from 2015-16 to the Department of Finance to install more secure networking equipment and to provide additional capability for secure wireless infrastructure in electorate offices and Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices connecting to the Parliamentary Computing Network. The replacement of obsolete communications equipment will result in improved information technology security for electorate offices and parliamentary
systems in Parliament House. "

Part 2: Staffing of Agencies - Budget

"Some of the overall reductions in staffing levels will be offset by temporary increases in particular areas to manage implementation of policy change or to build infrastructure required to achieve future automation and efficiencies. This includes investment in the information technology systems of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the first tranche of the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation Programme."

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

The "National Broadband Network" (NBN) recieves limited attention for such a large project, with only two mentions, down from four last year and eleven the year before. Curiously I could not find a dollar figure for the NBN, instead "Your Government online":

"The Government is delivering the National Broadband Network faster and at less cost, to enable all Australians to connect to transformative services online. ...

That is why the Government is investing $254.7 million in the Digital Transformation Agenda to transform government service delivery.

This includes the establishment of a Digital Transformation Office to drive the Agenda and ensure that Government services are simpler and easier to use and can be completed from start to finish online.
The first phase of the Agenda will include provisions to:

• implement a Digital Service Standard to apply to all Government agencies to make services simpler, faster and easier to use;
• design and deliver more myGov services with an improved digital inbox, ‘tell us once’ services, and a new digital account for businesses that can be accessed using myGov; and
• a simpler, more consistent and efficient grants administration process across government.

The Agenda will also include the implementation of a Streamlined Business Registration service announced in the Jobs and Small Business package. This will simplify the process of registering a business."

The provision for the "Stage One and establishment of the Digital Transformation Office" is a relatively modest $0.3M.

Pia Waugh, from the Digital Transformation Office  will be speaking at  Open Knowledge Australia's "Open Data and Digital Services: Foundations for a New Information Economy" in Canberra, 2:30pm, 13 May 2015.

In 2013/2014 the Government "recommitted" to "Remote Indigenous Internet Access", but but without an explicit amount of money committed to the program. Last year there were no such programs in the budget.This year there is provision for: " remote Indigenous internet training"  $2.2M.

In 2013/2015 the Government announced it would save $31.2 M over two years by incorporating the functions of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) into the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system. Last year $140.6 million was provided in for the PCEHR. The government  has now renamed the project "My Health Record":

"The Government will invest $485 million to improve the electronic health record system for all Australians."

 This project has already cost many hundreds of millions of dollars for little result. I suggest it requires investigation by the Auditor-General, if not the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP).


QUALITY OF THE WEB PAGE

This year budget web site worked well (except the search function). Each year from 1996 to 2006 the budget web site was improved. By 2007-08 it reached a stable design, also used for to 2011/2013, using HTML 4.01 Transitional. The 2014/15 had s similar design using HTML5.  The 2015/2016 website has changed to a more mobile friendly design. The home page scored 91/100 on Google's Mobile PageSpeed Insights for User Experience. The page received a 62 / 100 for Speed, which is not as good as it could be, given the heavy traffic it is likely to experience.

The home page failed a W3C HTML Markup Validation test, with fifteen errors. These are not serious problems and easily fixed, but it is curious that such a high profile page is not tested more thoroughly.

The home page scored a very poor 0 out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker. The total size of the page is  527.2KB (document: 14.6KB - stylesheets: 81.4KB - images: 431.1KB). This much smaller than  2014/2015 when the page ballooned to 17.9MB, but the style-sheets and images could be trimmed.

The budget home page failed a aChecker automated accessibility test (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) but with just two very minor and easily corrected problems.

The Budget is released under a a Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia license, in line with open access government policy (commenced 2012/13).

Comments on past budgets:

1996 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9608/0096.html
1997 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9705/0315.html
1998 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9805/0174.html
1999 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9905/0265.html
2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0005/0358.html
2002 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/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 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20122013.html
2013 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20132014.html
2014 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2014/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20142015.html
2014 Changes to Australian Higher Education in the 2014/2015 Federal Budget

IT matters of interest in the 2014/2015 Federal Budget

Just about every year since the Australian Federal Budget was first put on the web, I have done a quick search though the documents to find matters of interest in information technology.

IT IN THE BUDGET

The budget search service responded promptly. References to "Information Technology" were down from 5 last year to 4 (well below the 15 in 2011/12). All the references to IT were in Budget Paper No. 1 "Budget Strategy and Outlook":

1. Statement 4: Sustaining strong growth in living standards - Conclusion
2. Statement 8: Statement of Risks - Fiscal risks
3. Statement 8: Statement of Risks - Contingent liabilities and assets
4. Statement 8: Statement of Risks - Contingent liabilities — unquantifiable

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

The "National Broadband Network" (NBN) is getting less attention, with 4 mentions, down from 11 last year. The NBN will be funded for two further years, at which point the built infrastructure will be required to be self supporting.

 Last year the Government "recommitted" to "Remote Indigenous Internet Access", but but without an explicit amount of money committed to the program. This year, apart from the NBN I could not find any similar programs, for indigenous or other communities.

Last year the Government announced it would save $31.2 M over two years by incorporating the functions of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) into the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system. This year $140.6 million is to be provided in 2014-15 for the PCEHR. This project has not gone well and the Government could have achieved a larger saving, by cancelling the PCEHR.

The government is bringing forward $500 M for Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, the Romeo Naval anti-submarine combat helicopter and upgraded to Naval Standard Missile-2 anti-aircraft missiles. Unlike some other Defence projects, these have gone relatively well and will provide a useful asset in a time of increased tension in our region.

The Bureau of Meteorology will get a new supercomputer, over the longer term, at an undisclosed cost. The Department of Education will spend $3.8 M over four years on the Higher Education Information Management System (HEIMS)  for university and higher education data.

NICTA’s funding, of about $40 M per year for IT research, will end after 2015–16. NICTA has a significant number of PHD students jointly with universities, who presumably continue to be funded.

Also the Australian Interactive Games Fund will be ended with $10 M not going to game developers.

Apart from these minor items, there is not much explicitly on IT in the budget. However, the planned changes to government functions will require considerable changes to IT systems, resulting in work for years to come for IT professionals (be they public servants or private contractors).

Cuts to federal school and hospital funding may also see an increase in demand for new IT systems to reduce costs and increase efficiency, as well as new ways to deliver health and education.

In addition changes to higher education will also require new IT systems. The deregulation of tuition fees from 2016 will require minimal direct changes. However, there is likely to be a reshuffling of campuses, with some major city universities closing regional campuses.

The opening financial assistance to students studying diplomas may change the way higher education is delivered in Australia. Students who would have previously enrolled in a bachelors degree at a university, may opt for a shorter and cheaper diploma at a state government TAFE or private Registered Training Organisation (RTO), then top up their education with a part-time blended or fully on-line degree. This will require an expansion of IT systems to support the new education options. Also IT courses are likely to be one of those disciplines most changed.

However, certificates are not included in the new higher education funding scheme. The shortest program the student can get funding assistance for is a diploma, which normally requires one year full time study. Certificates, which require six months full time study are very useful, as they allow students to quickly get a qualification for a job. Where institutions offer four terms a year, a part time student can do a certificate in one year. I did my Graduate Certificate in Higher Education this way, mostly on-line.


QUALITY OF THE WEB PAGE

This year budget web site worked fine at 08:44pm and kept working (in 2010 the system failed at 7:53pm, reporting: "HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found").

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, with HTML 4.01 Transitional. The2014/15 site is much the same but using HTML5. The code is mostly clean and efficient. However, I found curious syntax error on the home page, where a hypertext link (on "Transcript of the Treasurer's budget night speech") was not correctly nested (the sort of error a school student should not make, let alone information professionals)

As happened last year, the home page failed a W3C HTML Markup Validation test, but with a decrease from fourteen to three errors (really just two).

The home page scored a very poor 0% p(down from 33% last year) on the W3C mobileOK Checker. This is unfortunate, given the  use of smart phones and tablet computers in the last year (and the government plan to lessen funding for broadband). The home page is  The total size of the page 17.9MB, with 17.7MB of images. The problem is 14 background images of about 1 MB each. There is not sensible reason for this. Last year I commented that the size of image files used should be reduced to improve the efficiency of the site, but instead the images files have got stupidly large. It is a little difficult to take a document about reducing government waste serious, which is using more than tens times the amount of resources as needed.

The budget home page failed a aChecker automated accessibility test (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) but with sixteen known problems (up from five problems last year). These could be easily corrected.

As introduced last year, important tables in the budget documents are rendered as well formatted HTML tables, not as the blurry image files in previous years. This make it possible to increase the size of the text for easier reading. Also a table can be simply copied into a word processing document with the layout intact, or into a spreadsheet for extra analysis. The headings are marked up in HTML has headings, which should make it much easier for assistive technology to interpret.

The PDF version of the budget overview has almost halved in size, down from 5 MB last year to 2.7 MB. , but still much smaller than the 16.6Mbytes, the web page quotes. The Budget is released under a a Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia licence, in line with open access government policy (commenced 2012/13).

Comments on past 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 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20122013.html
2013 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20132014.html

MAJOR SECTIONS OF THE BUDGET

• Budget Speech
• Budget Overview 
• Portfolio Budget Statements

Budget Papers:

1. Budget Strategy and Outlook
2. Budget Measures
3. Federal Financial Relations
4. Agency Resourcing

Also 2014 Federal Budget - ACS Response

Labels: Australian Government, defence, ICT Policy

Shared Services for the Australian Government

Greetings form the Australian Computer Society Canberra meeting, where Susan Monkley, Group Manager, Technology Solutions Group, Department of Education is speaking on "Merging IT in government (and de-merging)". The Australian Government underwent significant changes, with mergers and de-mergers of departments, after the last election and a new government. But as Susan pointed put, this can happen at any time. She referred to them by what sounded like "moggs", but turned out to be "MoGs" (Machinery of Government changes). The Australian Public Service Commission has details of what happens with staff as well as more general advice during a MoG.

In IT terms Susan pointed out that previous MOGs  took about seven years for split agencies to completely separate their IT systems. Similarly mergers resulted in duplicated functions, until this could be rationalised. As Susan pointed out this is not just a matter of technical standards, but also work styles. Some changes are just too hard to make and agencies can have other agencies continue to run systems for them.

Susan pointed out it was not just a matter of transferring people from one agency’s system to another. Staff may need access to their old agency's systems for weeks or years after the change. Different security policies may impose large burdens on agencies when staff need to be cleared. She mentioned single sign-on as an aim for the future fpr all of government (at the start of my public service career several decades ago we used second hand equipment left over from ManData, a failed whole-of-government project).

Susan mentioned at the end of her talk that the newly demerged  Departments of Education and Employment will have a shared services centre to deliver services to both (not just ICT services). This is an interesting idea which could be expanded to other like agencies. However, as Susan pointed out when I asked about it, the temptation to expand this to agencies which have very different tasks should be avoided. The ACT Government has Shared Services for ICT, Human Resources and Finance. The Shared Services SA provides shared services for the South Australian Government, The APSC has some notes on shared services.

Susan will discuss the transformation journey of the Department of Education’s IT operations including the challenges specific to IT operations in federal government.
Machinery of Government changes significantly impact the operations of government business. Department’s may merge, new department’s may be created, and functions can be transferred from one agency to another. People working in government IT operations are impacted in two key ways. Firstly they have a significant role supporting business areas and people move between departments. Secondly, Machinery of Government changes sometimes result in significant changes to the size, structure, client base and nature of the IT operation. The Department of Education has recent experience of such a change and Susan will discuss the approaches and outcomes of managing transformational change.

Restructuring the Australian Government Through IT

Susan Monkley, Group Manager, Technology Solutions Group, Department of Education, will speak on "Merging IT in government (and de-merging)" at the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, 5pm, 4th February 2014.

Susan will discuss the transformation journey of the Department of Education’s IT operations including the challenges specific to IT operations in federal government.
Machinery of Government changes significantly impact the operations of government business. Department’s may merge, new department’s may be created, and functions can be transferred from one agency to another. People working in government IT operations are impacted in two key ways. Firstly they have a significant role supporting business areas and people move between departments. Secondly, Machinery of Government changes sometimes result in significant changes to the size, structure, client base and nature of the IT operation. The Department of Education has recent experience of such a change and Susan will discuss the approaches and outcomes of managing transformational change.

Broadband for Smart Cities

The book "Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013) by Anthony M. Townsend, looks at how cities can use information and communications technology. Townsend covers a lot of territory, looking at cities not only in the USA but in developing nations and issues from security, to the environment. Unfortunately the narrative is a little hard to follow and for the first hundred pages I wondered what the book was about. It was only when Townsend started relating his own experience of building community non-profit WiFi services in New York that the book started to make sense. The heavy emphasis on US developments of technology is also a little distracting. There is barely any acknowledgement that many ICT developments came from elsewhere (for example, the World Wide Web from Europe, the ARM chip from the UK and WiFi from Australia). Townsend raises many issues but then seems to move on to another. This is a useful book to dip into, but frustrating to read from start to finish.

The attempts Townsend relates of communities to provide ubiquitous broadband are very relevant to current Australian discussions of the National Broadband Network (NBN). He relates lobbying of government by telecommunications companies interested in not having a public sector rival. Townsend is suspicious of private company involvement in community networking. He portrays non-profit community providers of broadband in USA as heroes and credits mobile data networks in developing nations with being important in economic development, However, Townsend seems reluctant to acknowledge the role of telecommunications companies in providing wireless broadband in developed nations. There has been a problem that the telcos have charged prices for mobile broadband. For Australia I have suggested that mobile broadband could complement cabled services, with some govenrment intervention.

Effect of New Government on ICT in Canberra

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch meeting, where Scott Cass-Dunbar, Director, IT Advisory, KPMG is talking on "Bigger than big data – the real trends reshaping IT in Canberra". Even before the new coalition government has introduced spending cuts, there has been a downturn in government ICT.  Scott commented that the more rigorous process for approval of projects has meant that fewer projects get approved. New people in AGIMO have taken time to settle into their jobs.

Scott commented that ICT was an easy area for budget cuts to be focused on, which will be a problem into the future. There are government projects which need significant investment, which they are unlikely to receive. In addition, Scott pointed out that the APS has an aging ICT workforce reaching retirement age, who may not be replaced.

Scott then looked at the "The Coalition’s plan for the digital economy & e-Government" (Liberal party of Australia, 2013). He commented that many of the issues addressed by the new government are similar to those from Sir David Varney's 2006 report for the UK Government "Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer".

Scott emphasized that the new government's plans for ICT were not aspirations, were very actionable and to be implemented within a few years. He gave Canada's on-line services as an example of what might be provided. Many of these changes are around the use of the Internet in place of physical delivery of services. This is not just for access in remote areas, but also in cities to replace face-to-face government services.

The new Government will aim to reduce ICT cost and complexity with shared or cloud services. The "heavy" ICT user agencies will retain autonomy of their ICT, but required to provide regular reports to DoFD and AGIMO. The "heavy" agencies will provide services to other agencies. Also there will be sharing with state and local government. As a former public servant, I have some doubts about how this will be implemented.

A trial of a secure government cloud for "critical data" by 2014 will be conducted. Also measures to attract and retain IT staff will be introduced (I am not sure what these will be). Also there will be more interchange of staff between levels of government and the private sector.

An "Australian Government ICT Advisory Board" will be created to provide senior private sector ICT advice. It will be interesting to see how the private sector advisers will cope with the special requirements of government.

There is expected to be a two month "commission of audit" followed by about three months while the results are considered. This could result in many moths of delay in new projects. There is expected to be considerable competition for expertise for delivering ICT services.

Scott suggested there was scope for ICT professionals to become drivers in the new processes. New proposals for ICT based services can be put as unsolicited bids (including from universities).

As someone who helps educate ICT professionals, one omission from the strategies of the new government is obtaining staff with the required skills. Simply buying these skills from the private sector can be very expensive. The Australian Government could re-skills some of their staff to provide what is needed.
Scott sees the "ICT Professional 2.0" as needing need EQ, Personal Communication, Policy Understanding, Funded Outcomes, PBS, Technology Business Translator, Personal Brand, Reputation and understanding the reasons for systems. These are not attributes, I suggest,  which staff can get simply from doing a short training course. Although I have proposed teaching communication skills to graduates.

One risk for the new government is a lack of understanding and interest in ICT, apart from Malcolm Turnbull,  with no equivalent to the ALP's Senator Kate Lundy.

Formulating Telecommunications Policy for Australia

The Australian Computer Society is convening a series of round-tables on telecommunications policy in August: Sydney Friday 16, Brisbane Tuesday 20 and Melbourne Thursday 29. My suggestion is policy on cyber security to combine public, industry and government efforts.

The role of telecommunications in driving national productivity is well known. Combined with rapid advances in cloud services and the developing open data revolution, the increasing levels of broadband connectivity in Australia bring us to a unique position in our history.

Australia is on the cusp of a new era of service delivery in many areas. 2013 also brings new challenges and new opportunities for the Telecoms industry and I am writing to all TSA members to invite you to a series of round-table conversations, seeking your views and expertise to help identify and clarify the challenges and opportunities facing Australia as viewed from a Telecoms perspective.

The roundtable conversations will take place in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne during August and will complement the work being done within the Australia 3.0 forum http://www.iawards.com.au/events/australia-3-0.aspx (a joint ACS, AiiA, Pearcey Foundation activity) which has looked at issues of productivity and enablers more broadly across the digital economy.

Our opportunity now is to focus on Telecoms in Australia. To seed the roundtable conversations, we will provide material from Australia 3.0 to registered attendees before the event.

Your thoughts and ideas are also welcome (please send these to tsa(a)acs.org.au before the roundtable dates). Places are limited for each roundtable conversation, so please RSVP at least one week before the event: Sydney Friday 16, Brisbane Tuesday 20 and Melbourne Thursday 29.

Having Public Servants Work On-line to Advance Digital Economy

Hamish Barwick  reported that Senator Kate Lundy had told a recent IT conference that government agencies will replace paper forms and face-to-face contact with on-line equivalents ("More government services to go online: Kate Lundy", CIO Magazine, 25 July, 2013 15:27). The government issued "Advancing Australia as a Digital Economy: Update to the National Digital Economy Strategy", but this does not appear to have received the attention it deserves. Chapter 11 of the strategy sets the target that:

By 2020, four out of five Australians will choose to engage with the Government through the internet or other types of online service.

However, one barrier to on-line use which does not appear to be addressed is the digital literacy of public servants. For citizens to engage with government on-line, we first need to ensure that public servants are trained in how to engage with each other on-line. Services such as GovDex, the public service's own internal cross-agency on-line platform, are underutilized. Public servants tend to still occupy much of their time with last-century face-to-face committee meetings.

Substituting email for paper minutes and video conference for face to face is a small improvement, but real productivity gains will require staff to be trained in how to collaborate effectively on-line and given incentives. I find it takes about three weeks for my masters students in on-line courses (many of whom are public servants) to adjust to working in on-line forums. It comes as a shock to many how hard it is to make the transition and I suspect many would not do the work needed, if it was not for the prospect of failing the course (where on-line participation is assessed every week).

The Australian Public Service needs to put in place targets and effective training programs, with incentives for staff to participate and penalties for those who do not. We will then have a public service which is competent to communicate with the public on-line.

IT matters of interest in the 2013/2014 Federal Budget

Just about every year since the Australian Federal Budget was first put on the web, I have done a quick search though the documents to find matters of interest in information technology.

This year budget web site worked fine at 08:20pm 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. The 2011/2013 designed is essentially the same but the quality of implementation appears to have declined slightly. The site is in the same HTML 4.01 Transitional, as the last three  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, but with an increase from four to fourteen errors. These are minor ones and the same number as last three years.

The home page scored a poor 33% (down from 45% last year) on the W3C mobileOK Checker. This is unfortunate, given the increase in the use of smart phones and tablet computers in the last year. Last year I commented that the size o image files used should be reduced to improve the efficiency of the site, but instead the images files have increased, reducing the usability of the site.

The budget home page failed a aChecker automated accessibility test (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) but with only with five problems which could be easily corrected.  But it is disappointing that with a document as important as the budget these errors exist.

A major improvement this year is that important tables are rendered as HTML, not as blurry image files as in previous years. This make it possible to increase the size of the text for easier reading. Also a table can be simply copied into a word processing document with the layout intact, or into a spreadsheet for extra analysis.

The headings are marked up in HTML has headings, which should make it much easier for assistive technology to interpret. 

The PDF version of the budget overview has doubled in size from last year to 5 Mbytes, but still much smaller than the 16.6Mbytes, the web page quotes. The Budget is released under a Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia license, in line with open access government policy (commenced last year).

IT IN THE BUDGET

The budget search service responded promptly. References to "Information Technology" were down from 6 last year to 5 (well below the 15 in 2011/12):

1. Budget Strategy and Outlook 2013-14 - Budget Paper 1 - Statement 8: Statement of Risks
2. Budget Strategy and Outlook - Budget Paper No. 1 - Statement 1: Budget Overview - A Plan for Australian Jobs
3. Budget Measures 2013-14 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Attorney-General's
4. Budget Measures 2013-14 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Treasury
5. Budget Measures 2013-14 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense Measures - Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

The "National Broadband Network" continues to dominate government thinking on IT, with 11 mentions (but down from 24 last year) in the budget papers.

The Government is "recommitting" to "Remote Indigenous Internet Access", but I could not find an amount of money committed to.

The Government will save $31.2 M over two years by incorporating the functions of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) into the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system. Unfortunately this does not represent much of a saving, or benefit to the community. The PCEHR has not delivered a usable e-heath record system and there is no prospect of a workable system being produced, after an expenditure of many hundreds of millions of dollars. The Government could have achieved a larger saving, by canceling the PCEHR.

Comments on past 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 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20122013.html

MAJOR SECTIONS OF THE BUDGET

• 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
• Portfolio Additional Estimates Statements

• Ministerial Statements

NBN as a Critical Infrastructure

Professor Catherine Middleton, Ryerson University,  talked at "Converging on an NBN Future". She pointed out a difference between  Australia's NBN and North American provision of broadband is that the NBN can be a Critical Infrastructure. Broadband access is being provided in most countries as a "best effort" service with patchy provision. Even so Dr. Middleton points out that provision is either a monopoly or quasi monopoly in the USA. As NBN is one national engineered service it can be relied on for provision of essential public services. This is a reasonable argument, but it is not clear if the NBN has been engineered as a safety critical system which, for example, will continue to operate during power failures and will automatically give essential services priority.

NBN Co. Monopolistic Actions Need Intervention from Regulator

Sean Casey from NBN Co talked at "Converging on an NBN Future". He described the separate services which could be provided via the NBN. Unfortunately this did not sound credible as it followed from Professor Matthew Allen who explained how customers are sophisticated enough to see that the NBN provides one service, which is high speed Internet access.

As a commercial company NBN Co. will want to give customers the impression that the NBN can deliver a variety of services, so as to charge different amounts for essentially the same service and so maximise profit. But given that NBN Co. are are essentially a monopoly, perhaps the regulator needs to step in now and decide if this is acceptable.

Victorian Government ICT Strategy

A draft "Victorian Government ICT Strategy" (1 October 2012) is available for comment by 17 October 2012. The 25 page document is available in PDF  and Microsoft Word, but not as a native web page. The strategy mentions a couple of successful ICT projects, but contains no references to past Victorian government strategies, nor problems with previous ICT projects. It seems that the Victorian government is unwilling to learn from the past and so is likely to repeat mistakes, such as the MyKi Ticketing Project.

Victorian Whole of Government ICT Strategy

The Victorian government has announced work on a Whole of Government ICT Strategy. This follows an Ombudsman and Auditor-General released a "Own motion investigation into ICT-enabled projects" (November 2011).

The Ombudsman and AG looks at ten major Victorian IT projects which were over-budget and under performed. The best known of the problem projects is the MyKi smart ticketing system. The problems found are common to IT projects in the public and private sectors and the remedies will be familiar to any student of IT.

It is well know in the IT profession that many IT projects fail and that these failures are usually due to problems of project governance, not technical issues. When working for the Defence Department I part of a team which did a quick investigation of an IT project each week. These projects had sincere hardworking staff, who in most cases knew what was wrong, but were trapped in a system which would not admit failure.

Unfortunately, these days as an ICT consultant, I am called in only after a project has failed to be an expert witness in court cases, when blame is being assigned. Given a pile of project documents about a metre high, I can usually find the point (about one third from the start of the project), where it started to go wrong. This is where the project plan said the project was to meet a milestone, but did not. Rather than stop the project at this point and rectify the problem (or cancel the project), the management choose to keep going and hope for the best, which does not happen.

This "hope for the best" attitude is something I help teach IT students at the Australian National University to avoid. It will be interesting to see how the Victorian Government's new strategy evolves.

Some excerpts from the 125 page report:

Contents
Foreword
Executive summary

• Common themes
  
• Framework to better manage ICT-enabled projects

Background

• What is ICT?
  
• History
• Investigation
• Cabinet documents
• CenITex
• Report structure

Common themes

1. Leadership, accountability and governance
2. Planning
3. Funding
4. Probity and procurement
5. Project management

Framework to better manage ICT-enabled projects and recommendations

1. Leadership, accountability and governance
2. Planning
3. Funding
4. Probity and procurement
5. Project management

Case studies

1. Link
2. HealthSMART
3. myki
4. RandL
5. Client Relationship Information System (CRIS)
6. Ultranet
7. Integrated Courts Management System (ICMS)
   
8. Property and Laboratory Management (PALM)
9. HRAssist
10. Housing Integrated Information Program (HIIP)

...

Framework to better manage ICT-enabled projects ...

Leadership, accountability and governance
• Agency executives are to show stronger leadership; robust governance practices are to be implemented; and project staff are to be held to account for the performance of ICT-enabled projects.
• The role of DTF in ICT-enabled projects is to be enhanced and the value of Gateway as a mechanism for external oversight and accountability is to be capitalised.

Planning
• Business cases for some of the projects I examined were not subjected to adequate scrutiny. I have made recommendations to improve the level of scrutiny applied. The government’s ’high-value and high-risk’ process introduced in 2010 also provides for increased
scrutiny of business cases.

Funding
• Agencies are to adopt a whole of life approach to costing and funding major ICT systems and DTF is to assist by establishing a maintenance and replacement fund for these systems.
• The government is to consider refining how projects are funded to make agencies more accountable to government throughout the life of major ICT-enabled projects.

Probity and procurement
• Agencies are to adopt stricter probity practices.
• Agencies are to adopt robust approaches to purchasing ICT systems; DTF is to explore the potential to harness best practice procurement practices from other countries; and the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office is to examine and endorse all proposed contracts before they are signed to ensure the contract protects the interests of the state.

Project management
• Agencies are to adopt established project management methods.
• DTF and the State Services Authority (SSA) are to develop strategies to recruit and retain skilled ICT staff within government and better monitor the quality of work provided by contractors. ...

3. myki

Key issues
• The project is at least $350 million over budget and at least four years behind schedule.
• The Transport Ticketing Authority (TTA) was overly optimistic in believing it could achieve a two-year delivery of the system: less than half that achieved elsewhere in the world.
• The project proposed an ‘open architecture’43 solution: an approach not previously undertaken, heightening associated risk.
• The ‘outcomes-based’44 agreement proved problematic to manage and led to ambiguities and specification ‘creep’.
• Two Chief Executive Officers departed the TTA shortly following failure by the TTA to meet key delivery dates.
• Initially, the TTA board did not have the requisite number of appointees with relevant experience when needed.
• The Department of Transport (DOT)45 had responsibility for ticketing policy issues, but did not have a representative on the board. In my view, it should have.
• The TTA was highly critical of the quality of the project managers employed by the vendor. ...


From: Own motion investigation into ICT-enabled projects, Victorian Ombudsman and Victorian Auditor-General, November 2011

IT matters of interest in the 2012/2013 Federal Budget

Just about every year since the Australian Federal Budget was first put on the web, I have done a quick search though the documents to find matters of interest in information technology.

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
• Operable 0
• Understandable 2
• assistive technologies."> Robust 2

These were relatively minor problems, easily corrected. But it is disappointing that with a document as important as the budget these errors exist. As an example, there is no top level (h1) heading in the document, the language used is no specified.

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):

1. 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. …
2. 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 …
3. 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. …
4. 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. …
5. 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. …
6. 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. …

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

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

• 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
• Portfolio Additional Estimates Statements
• Portfolio Supplementary Additional Estimates Statements

• Ministerial Statements
• Past Budgets
  

Draft Australian e-Waste Standard

The draft Australia/New Zealand standard "Collection, Storage, Transport and Treatment of Used Electrical and Electronic Equipment" (AS/NZS 5377) is available for public comment until 15 May 2012. The document covers computers and telecommunications equipment, as well as other electrical equipment. The contentious issue of estimating the rate of recycling is covered in appendix C of the document. Release of the draft is timely as my ICT Sustainability students at the Australian National University are studying e-Waste this week.

Scope

This Standard sets out principles and minimum requirements for the safe and environmentally sound collection, storage, transport and treatment of used electrical and electronic equipment in order to maximize reuse and material recovery, reduce or eliminate the amount of waste from this equipment going to final disposal operations such as landfill, safeguard worker health, and minimize harm to the environment. This Standard covers electrical and electronic equipment, as outlined in Appendix A, designed for a supply voltage not exceeding 1000 volts for alternating current and 1500 volts for direct current. ...


CONTENTS

SECTION 1 SCOPE, OBJECTIVE APPLICATION AND GENERAL REQUIREMENTS
1.1 SCOPE 5
1.2 OBJECTIVE 5
1.3 APPLICATION 5
1.4 DEFINITIONS 5
1.5 GENERAL REQUIREMENTS 7
1.6 ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENTS 8
1.7 RECEIVING, HANDLING AND STORAGE 9
1.8 RECORDS MANAGEMENT 10
1.9 DATA SECURITY 10
1.10 DISPOSAL TO LANDFILL 10

SECTION 2 REQUIREMENTS FOR COLLECTION AND STORAGE FACILITIES
2.1 GENERAL 11
2.2 LICENSING 11
2.3 ACCESS 11
2.4 SIGNAGE AND INFORMATION 11
2.5 STORAGE AND HANDLING 11
2.6 BROKEN OR DUMPED MATERIAL 12
2.7 STOCKPILING 13

SECTION 3 REUSE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT
3.1 GENERAL 14
3.2 PREPARING FOR REUSE 14
3.3 HARVESTING OF REUSABLE EQUIPMENT 14
3.4 HARVESTING REUSABLE ASSEMBLIES, COMPONENTS AND PARTS 15
3.5 LEGAL COMPLIANCE AND EXPORT OF USED EQUIPMENT, ASSEMBLIES, COMPONENTS AND PARTS FOR REUSE 15
3.6 RESIDUAL WASTE FROM REUSE ACTIVITIES 15

SECTION 4 REQUIREMENTS FOR TRANSPORTATION
4.1 GENERAL 16
4.2 OBJECTIVES OF TRANSPORTING USED ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT 16
4.3 GENERAL TRANSPORTATION REQUIREMENTS 16
4.4 DOMESTIC TRANSPORTATION 16
4.5 EXPORT REQUIREMENTS 16
4.6 IMPORT REQUIREMENTS 17

SECTION 5 REQUIREMENTS FOR THE TREATMENT
5.1 GENERAL 18
5.2 PROCESSING AND HANDLING 18
5.3 TRACEABILITY 23
5.4 DOWNSTREAM PROCESSORS AND SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT 23
5.5 RECYCLING AND RECOVERY RECORD MANAGEMENT 23

APPENDICES
A ITEMS DESIGNATED AS ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT 24
B MINIMUM ACCEPTABLE PROCESSING, END USE AND METHOD OF DISPOSAL FOR USED ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT 29
C DETERMINATION OF RECYCLING AND RECOVERY RATES 35 ...

From: Collection, Storage, Transport and Treatment of Used Electrical and Electronic Equipment, AS/NZS 5377, draft Australia/New Zealand standard