Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to take the opportunity to recognise some of the excellent work that has been taking place by the Government 2.0 Taskforce; the commitment to openness and transparency by our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd; the initiative and long-term interest in open government by Minister Lindsay Tanner; and important initiatives across the portfolios of Minister Ludwig and Minister Conroy in the area of information and the digital economy. I would also like to take this opportunity to recognise the efforts of community organisations, such as Open Australia, who provide an invaluable service in making government information accessible to the general public as well as the broader community, and that advocates strongly for Gov 2.0 and how government embraces the changes offered by the internet on improving engagement in our democracy.

It is worth noting of course that our community is increasingly going online. We are finding new opportunities for employment, peer support, education, service delivery and ways to better engage with communities in areas of interest. In general, society’s expectations have started to change as they have become online consumers and customers and, indeed, online citizens. We can see almost every industry and community sector responding to this new demand as a more and more interesting online presence emerges for these organisations. In Australia we have traditionally done quite well in citizen engagement and general openness, but we are finding ourselves having to adapt to the changing expectations of the community. I believe that we will also find that online tools and open-community methods will be extremely beneficial in the growth and evolution of our democratic system as it presents those new opportunities.

I would like to mention one of those opportunities around opening up information and allowing citizens to innovate and value-add to that information. Very recently around the country there was a series of what are called ‘mashup’ events. A mashup is where software and web developers get together using publicly created datasets to generate innovative projects using those government datasets in interesting ways. A mashup is basically presenting and aggregating information in a practical way—for instance, plotting the locations of health facilities or schools from an interactive map or comparing internet access statistics to family income numbers, for a school assignment.

Opening up useful government datasets has proved extremely successful in the United States, where all government data is made publicly available, unless of course there is a genuine security, privacy or business case to not make it public. There have been several significant social and economic benefits from this approach. For instance, they found that making geospatial data publicly available increased the value 20 times more to the economy than what could have been generated by commercialising that data themselves. Generally, the net economic and social impact of open government data is far greater than closed or commercialised data. We are not talking about just putting a spreadsheet online; rather, it is about the appropriate permissive copyright environment, having good metadata standards—this is the information that describes the information that is being placed in those datasets—as well as ensuring that the information can be accessed in the future: that is, open standards.

The second opportunity is about delivering truly citizen-centric services. Many of our government departments and agencies deliver great services for citizens already and the online platform can enhance their existing efforts. Once geospatial information and other associated metadata can be accessed you can bring information to life by presenting it in a contextually useful way to the citizen. For instance, a citizen can put their postcode in and have a map presented to them with the services closest to them relevant to their circumstance. It changes the game in that it means that services can be personalised and more accessible and useful to citizens. Our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, spoke on this recently in a speech to the Institute of Public Administration. He said:

The first impact of changing technology and changing expectations is in day to day service delivery—which is the starting point for improving the average Australian family’s encounter with government.

The Prime Minister mentioned Centrelink as a model of a modern client-focused arm of government service delivery, and I fully concur.

Whilst the government explores the many methodologies that are available to enhance their citizen-centric focus, I would certainly commend that presentation by the Prime Minister at the IPAA event as being a wonderful collection of ideas about the future directions of the Rudd Labor government in enhancing citizen-centric government services delivery.