[LINK] IT matters of interest in the 2013/2014 Federal Budget
Tom Worthington
tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue May 14 21:20:26 AEST 2013
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"): http://www.budget.gov.au/
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:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F2013-14%2Findex.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
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:
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=20130514102131124.mobile1&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.budget.gov.au%2F2013-14%2Findex.htm
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: http://achecker.ca/
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: http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/content/overview/
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):
http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/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 11 mentions (but down from 24 last year) in the
budget papers:
http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/search.asp?searchString=%22National+Broadband+Network%22&Submit=Submit&Submit=Search
The Government is "recommitting" to "Remote Indigenous Internet Access",
but I could not find an amount of money committed to:
http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/content/overview/html/overview_36.htm
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:
http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/content/bp2/html/bp2_expense-13.htm
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
--
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 Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
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