In tax, the government often specifically instructs the taxboard to look at only the extent to which the legislation has worked according to its own stated rationales (that is why the taxboard is there).

Of course, everyone actually submits on policy questions anyway, which becomes an ‘FYI’ appendix to the report (and is not published) - thus the government gets the benefit of knowing what it should do without having any pressure to actually do any of it. In practice, suprise, the government cherry-picks what it wants.

Hardly best practice for those of us who don’t work on the taxboard or know someone who does!

This sort of thing is an important issue…. I wrote on it some time back at Balneus when the AGA was released with a BRM that was only a couple of paragraphs of motherhood statements rather than a real one (see this for my shock at the lack of a "real" BRM"). AGIMO tried hard…. and at least XML version of the RMs have been released since. Keep an eye on balneus.wordpress.com, because I’ll be dealing with this later (and usually putting an announcement here… although related, this is a bit off-topic for The Wonkery).

Thanks for the refs. I haven’t been into GovDex for about 6 months - and I was less than impressed with the content. Really, we need something like the DoDAF/MoDAF, the (DoD) JTA, a full (FEA) BRM, and the (DoD) BEA from the US before we can start making progress. Actually, the BEA is/was downloadable as a popkin tablespace for MS-SQL, and also as a 1000pp PDF of the pretty pictures. It was IMPRESSIVE.

Without everyone in government - at all levels - using the AGA, govdex is little more than a facebook - and the exporting is actually a bit of a worry giving the technical sensitivity of what SHOULD be in govdex.

As I said - this will be discussed in detail elsewhere sometime soon.

Which means you can leave anonymous comments, and reply to ones that are already there, hint hint. Maybe they don’t mean the public to be insinuating themselves in the process just yet, but, IMO, that’s where they are likely to go wrong.

“Australia.gov.au when it is relaunched in the first quarter of 2009…will join up government departments and personalise service offerings at a user level. A single sign-on capability will enable citizens to link their existing government online accounts with their Australia.gov.au account and allow them to move between government websites and transactions without needing to constantly reconfirm their identity.

Jobs for the Atlassian/Adaptavist boys?

The Govdex mission, it’s implementation Atlassian’s, Adaptavist’s “community bubbles” Confluence plug-in (for integrated blog functionality), the number of people, (and where they are, in and out of bureaucracy) who have been working with it, and for how long, and the amount of money Lindsay’s department has invested on all that, has to make it a contender, especially with that go-live date only 6-9 mths away.
The feature set seems to be there: I’ve noticed the platform gives users the ability to export their space ( and presumably transaction record) to zip/pdf/doc which is something you would want to be able to do when dealing with such a big brother app.

Given Dave rightfully pointed out the poor response from the blogosphere the last time this was floated, we should try to get organised for a proper response this time.

Here’s the relevant extract from Lindsay’s Speech:

“In the coming months we will open up an area of policy review to online consultation and engagement through a trial government consultation blog. This blog will give the online citizenry a chance to interact with the bureaucracy and make contributions to an area of government policy review.

I am working through the numerous issues inevitably associated with such a trial. Who runs it, how it is resourced, and how the Government is represented are all challenging questions. Yet the prize is huge. We can change the way people relate to governments. The dividends in responsiveness, policy quality and accountability could be enormous. We will also be keeping careful watch on e-government developments in other jurisdictions, noting best practice where it occurs.”

Lindsay Tanner, Minister for Finance, CeBit, 21 May 2008