Page 1396 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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that the government might say it is complying by providing those datasets rather than looking at the whole range of datasets available. The motion says we should save all ACT government publications under creative commons licences. We should be working towards this and ensuring that, as Ms Le Couteur says, the information that is contained in datasets is available and active well into the future as formats change. This is the case with ensuring that we have appropriate open standards for formats.
I do like her call in (2)(f) to sponsor competitions for creative use of ACT government datasets. This whole topic of openness of government and the making available of datasets—which Ms Le Couteur rightly points out the people of the ACT already own; they pay for them in their taxes—was a very strong issue in a number of sessions that I attended in last July’s National Conference of State Legislatures in Louisville. I suppose it was an area that I was interested in given the inquiry that was being conducted into the Freedom of Information Act. Washington DC had just conducted a competition for the creative use of datasets and the winning entry was perhaps not something that everyone would feel all that comfortable with.
A group of students managed to take the GPS elements of Washington DC, the public transport timetables, crime figures and associated information and put together an application which would help young Washingtonians go out to nightspots and avoid places where there were high levels of crime. You could optimise your safety when you were out at night by organising your pub crawl in a way that you would not be beaten up on the way while using public transport. I think there were a few people who were perplexed about that. But it did demonstrate ingenuity and show that a person who creates a dataset may see a particular use for it but other people coming to it with a different mindset will be able to find an innovative use for that dataset, for the benefit of the wider community.
This is a very thoughtful motion, and I commend Ms Le Couteur for it. There is much more that I would like to say on this, but given the fact that my standing committee is about to report on this matter I think that I am somewhat constrained—but the Canberra Liberals welcome this. We are ourselves in favour of open government and what we have done in the past five or six years in relation to, for instance, freedom of information reform highlights our commitment to that. Our commitment has been through action rather than talk, which is what we have seen from the Stanhope government. I suspect that today we are going to see more talk, which we will not be supporting, and even less action. I congratulate Ms Le Couteur on this motion. I am happy to support it in its amended form.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (11.11): I seek the leave of the Assembly to make a very minor amendment to my amendment, which is to insert the words “ACT government” and omit the word “all” in (d).
Leave granted.
MR CORBELL: I thank the Assembly. That amendment reflects the similar amendment that Ms Le Couteur moved to her motion. I move:
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