[LINK] Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions

[Tom Worthington]

Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and 
the Digital Economy is launching "Australia's Digital Economy: Future 
Directions" next week. I got a message from the Department inviting 
me along. Unfortunately the poor formatting of the message and the 
removal of the consultation page about the work lowers the 
credibility of the activity. The Department of Broadband, 
Communications and the Digital Economy does not seem to quite get how 
the digital economy works.

The invitation I was sent had a 855 kbyte PDF attachment, which I 
assumed to be a draft of the paper. It turned out to be just a one 
page invitation to the event. This contained 411 characters of text 
and was about 20 times larger than it need be. Most of the space was 
taken up by a high resolution copy of the Commonwealth Arms, which 
did not comply with Australian government branding guidelines and did 
not display correctly due to being drastically shrunk by the PDF 
viewer to fit on the screen.

I tried checking the Department's web page about the work, but this 
now says "You do not have permission to access Digital Economy 
Consultation" 
<http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/digital_economy_consultation>. 
The old page is still available via the Google cache 
<http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:_Y8ffvDAXdkJ:www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/digital_economy_consultation+%22+Digital+economy+consultation%22+site:dbcde.gov.au&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a>.

Perhaps it is time the Australian Government decided if it really 
wants to be part of the digital economy or not. If so then they need 
to make an effort to educate their staff on how to do that.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University