[LINK] IT matters of interest in the 2012/2013 Federal Budget

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue May 8 21:22:28 AEST 2012


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: http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/

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: 
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fbudget.gov.au%2F2012-13%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

The home page scored a poor 45% W3C mobileOK Checker, but up from a very 
poor 29% last year 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: 
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?async=false&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F2011-12%2F

The budget home page failed a TAW automated accessibility test, with 14 
Level A problems (WCAG 2.0): 
http://www.tawdis.net/system/modules/org.fundacionctic.taw4_wcag_informes_ocms/elements/wcag20/detalle.jsp?url=http://budget.gov.au/2012-13/&crc=1

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 labelled with the file size. The PDF 
version is not labelled "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): 
http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/search.asp?searchString=%22Information+Technology%22&Submit=Submit&Submit=Search

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: 
http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/search.asp?searchString=%22National+Broadband+Network%22&Submit=Submit&Submit=Search

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 center, 
which provides its output online, via the Internet, with staff and 
students located around Australia. It would be unfortunate if the 
excellent, but under-funded work, of the National Vet E-learning 
Strategy, was undermined by duplicating the work with three additional 
centres: http://flexiblelearning.net.au/

In school education, the government is continuing to fund computers for 
schools, rather than provide actual educational content via computers. 
There is also 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 giving a student a computer does not 
improve their education results. What is required is educational content 
on the computer and a teacher trained to use the computer for education. 
By failing to do this the federal government is wasting education finding.

The Budget provides a modest $54 M 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 about to sweep 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: http://myuniversity.gov.au/
However, the front page of the website scores 0 out of 100 on the W3C 
mobileOK Checker: 
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=20120508105629272.mobile2&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fmyuniversity.gov.au%2F
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 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 $200M to prepare for this. This a relatively 
insignificant amount in the budget, but the Future Submarine Project 
(SEA 1000) has the potential to cost many billions of dollars in the 
long term, with a very low probably of success. Additional funding may 
be needed to produce a workable submarine configuration, or Australia 
risks having 12 submarines which are even less capable than the current 
6 Collins class vessels.

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


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/



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