Page 1394 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
ACT government copyrights all publications by default. Unfortunately, our data is not stored in an open format. We use Microsoft Office. We use docx, which is a proprietary XML format. Microsoft looked at doing an open format but, unfortunately, what we have got here is not that open format. As I noted earlier, the government does not routinely release reports as soon as they are presented to it. It hangs on to them sometimes for years and years.
Getting to the heart of it, the motion calls on the government to make a declaration of open government, basically along the same lines as the commonwealth has done. Secondly, it calls on the government to:
… adopt a presumption of information disclosure rather than confidentiality.
Again, this is something the commonwealth has done. It is a change in mindset. Particularly in this situation, where governments in the ACT are normally minority governments, we should have collaborative government. The presumption of disclosure rather than confidentiality is where we need to be going. As I said before, we need to make appropriate datasets freely available. The ACTION timetable data is probably the number one example of this. It is unbelievable that that has not been made publicly available yet. Paragraph (2)(d) calls on the government to:
(d) copyright all ACT Government publications under creative commons licences …
I appreciate what the government said in its response to me—that it often makes works available for fair dealing if approached. But people should not need to go through that. The creative commons licence makes the responsibilities for attribution and fair dealing very clear. It would save everyone a lot of work to just do that. In (e) we call on the government to:
… save all information in formats which have open standards …
This is really needed if we are ever going to have readable archives of what we have been doing. In (f) we call on the government to:
… sponsor a competition for creative use of ACT Government datasets.
The commonwealth has done this. We could do one. It would be great fun. In (g) we call on the government to:
… investigate the use of information and communication technology to facilitate participatory democracy …
As other jurisdictions have done. Lastly, in my last three seconds, we call on the government to:
… report back on these issues by the last sitting day in September 2011.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.03): I thank Ms Le Couteur for bringing forward this motion today. I congratulate her on her motion, which the Canberra Liberals are happy to support in its entirety, especially now that Ms Le Couteur has added the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video