Page 4266 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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Part of the motion talks about telecommuting. There are a lot of positives in telecommuting and potentially, of course, some negatives. I will briefly go through some of the positives. One of the biggest is saving time for workers. If you do not have to spend half an hour each way going to work, or potentially even longer than that, that is more time you have got to do almost anything, which will be more fun. It will reduce transport requirements, and that will be greenhouse gas positive. It may reduce heating and cooling requirements, depending on the circumstances of your house versus the office. It may reduce the requirement for office space, and that could be a potential significant saving for the ACT government. It can often produce a lot more flexibility for workers, particularly those who have caring responsibilities as well as work responsibilities—not that I am trying to say that flexible working is a substitute for proper carers leave, but occasionally it can be very useful. I acknowledge, though, that it is not going to solve every problem. There are also some social issues.
In the time available to me, I would like to talk a little bit more about the non-hardware aspects of this. As I said, I have decided that there really was not enough time to talk about Gov 2.0 as part of this motion, but I think there are areas that the government is working on at present that could be made better without any major changes of technology or mindset. The first one, as I said, is committing to having things available on the government websites as soon as the consultation is in the public arena. The second one, of course, is committing to having the information retained as long as people are interested in it.
As the planning spokesperson, I often get inquiries from people about DAs which are no longer on ACTPLA’s website. I understand that ACTPLA are one of the biggest users of storage in the ACT government and I can appreciate why they have decided that they do not want to keep every DA on their website, but the DAs are still of interest to people. Could they not keep a database online and let people request access to the DA? It could be emailed to them in a couple of days after it has been retrieved from lower level storage. These are the sorts of things that the government need to start looking at to better use the information technology that they have available to them, because we all know those DAs are still electronically available.
While I am talking about DAs, the other obvious comment is that many DAs are huge and incomprehensible to the average person. The one in Griffith which I was recently asked to look at has over 100 individual files in it and the possibility of anyone comprehending that is very low. So in terms of information being made available, I would urge ACTPLA to look at providing some simple overviews of what is available. I would urge them to look at, as I mentioned very briefly, PlanningAlerts.org.au, which is run by OpenAustralia. They actually managed to produce a simple two-line summary of what the DA was about by scraping information from ACTPLA’s website. They are much easier to use than ACTPLA’s website itself. It can be done.
We talked earlier about the bus system. As I said, Melbourne has a much more complicated bus and tram system. If you go to Melbourne, you can put two addresses into the system and it will tell you how to get from one to the other. It gives you times. It tells you where you are going to have to walk to go from one to the other. Without
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