[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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