[LINK] IT matters of interest in the 2011/2012 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: 
<http://www.budget.gov.au/2010-11/>.

This year budget web site worked fine at 8pm and kept working (last year 
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 and 
2010/2011. 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 
two years: 
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F2011-12%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>.

The home page scored a very poor 29% on the W3C mobileOK Checker, down 
from 35% last year. This is unfortunate, given the increase in the use 
of smart phones and tablet computers in the last year: 
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?async=false&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F2011-12%2F>.

I was not able to conduct an automated accessibility test, but the home 
page seemed likely to pass at Level 1, as last year.

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

The budget search service responded promptly. References to "Information 
Technology" were down from 15 last year, to 5: 
<http://www.budget.gov.au/2011-12/search.asp?searchString=%22Information+Technology%22&Submit=Submit&Submit=Search>.

    1. Budget Measures 2011-12 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense 
Measures - Climate Change and Energy Efficiency : "Renewable Energy 
Target — implementation of legislative amendments ... This measure 
includes capital funding of $6.6 million over five years for information 
technology upgrades."
    2. Budget Strategy and Outlook 2011-12 - Budget Paper No. 1 - 
Statement 6: Expenses and Net Capital Investment: "investment by several 
agencies in information technology including the ATO and the Department 
of Finance and Deregulation...".
    3. Budget Measures 2011-12 - Budget Paper No. 2 - Part 2: Expense 
Measures - Treasury
    4. Budget Strategy and Outlook 2011-12 - Budget Paper No. 1 - 
Statement 8: Statement of Risks
    5. Education, Employment and Workplace Relations: "In addition, 
funding will be provided to enhance and improve the exchange of 
information between Centrelink and the Department of Education, 
Employment and Workplace Relations' information technology systems. This 
will improve the capacity of employment services providers and 
Centrelink staff to view and use appropriate material from each other."

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

The "National Broadband Network" continues to dominate government 
thinking on IT, with 24 mentions in the budget papers.

The $4.3B over six years for regional Australia is likely to involve 
significant IT expenditure for hospitals and health services, education.

The "Individual Electronic Health Record" (IEHR) system, which was a 
feature of last year's budget, was not mentioned.

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

More at: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20112012.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 Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra