[LINK] IT matters of interest in the 2010/2011 Federal Budget

[Tom Worthington]

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 I was able to access the 2010/2011 budget web site at 7:34pm 
<http://www.budget.gov.au/2010-11/>. Unfortunately by 7:53pm the system 
had failed, reporting: "HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found". 
 From the error message it appears that the government is using 
Microsoft Internet Information Services" (IIS) for providing the budget 
service. By 8:20pm the system was responding again.

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 and 
2010/2011. The site is in the same HTML 4.01 Transitional, as last year 
and has not been changed to XHTML, as used for newer web sites. The code 
is clean and efficient.

The home page failed a W3C HTML Markup Validation test, with 4 errors: 
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>. 
These are minor ones and the same number as last year. It is 
disappointing that with the importance of the budget, the Australian 
Government cannot correct minor web syntax errors. . I was not able to 
conduct an automated accessibility test, but it seemed likely to pass at 
Level 1, as last year. The home page scored a very poor 35% on the W3C 
mobileOK Checker, far worse than the 66% last year: 
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=20100511093743758&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F>.

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.

IT IN THE BUDGET

There were no big ticket IT items in the budget to match last year's 
National Broadband Network. However, several projects contain 
significant IT components, such $467 million to introduce individual 
electronic health records. Also a significant proportion of the $661 
million for the Skills for Sustainable Growth strategy, $5.6 billion for 
a an infrastructure fund and $1 billion to renew rail networks are 
likely to involve computers and telecommunications.

---
Personally controlled Individual Electronic Health Records

     The Government will provide $466.7 million over two years from 
2010‑11 to establish the key national components of a personally 
controlled Individual Electronic Health Record (IEHR) system. This will 
be a secure, online system that enables health care providers to access 
and use an individual's health care record when and where it is needed, 
as long as they have given their consent. ...

From: A National Health and Hospitals Network, Statement 1: Budget 
Overview, Budget, Australian Government, 11 May 2010 
<http://www.budget.gov.au/2010-11/content/bp1/html/bp1_bst1-07.htm>.
---

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

There were no big ticket IT items in the budget to match last year's 
National Broadband Network. However, several projects contain 
significant IT components, such $467 million to introduce individual 
electronic health records. Also a significant proportion of the $661 
million for the Skills for Sustainable Growth strategy, $5.6 billion for 
a an infrastructure fund and $1 billion to renew rail networks are 
likely to involve computers and telecommunications.

Comments on previous 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

More at: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20102011.html>



-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890