Australian Government releases historic budget - under a Creative Commons copyright license

Media commentators have called the Australian Government's budget "austere", "responsible" and "boring but good".

I call it historic.

Why so?

Look at the copyright information in Budget Paper 1: BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK. Budget Papers 2, 3 and 4 have been released on a similar basis.

What is different?

For the first time in history the Australian Government has released major parts of the Federal Budget under a Creative Commons (CC BY) copyright license.

This means that the public has the right, without first asking permission via the Attorney-General's office, to copy, mash-up, reuse and publicly republish data from appropriately licensed parts of the budget. They are legally entitled to use this material, provided they attribute the source, to create new and innovative works and insights.

This differs from previous Australian Government budgets where the contents were locked up tight under Commonwealth Copyright. While substantial rights were granted for the reuse of material in news reporting and private study, there was no right to otherwise mash-up or republish material publicly without asking permission.

Is this only historic from the perspective of past national Australian Governments?

I don't think so.

To my knowledge this is the first budget released by any government in Australian at any level under a license permitting reuse in this fashion - federal, state or local.

That's a lot of governments over more than 200 years.

Is this only historic from an Australian perspective?

Internationally this may be even more remarkable.

While copyright provisions vary around the world, Australia well be the first nation in the world to publish a national government budget under Creative Commons licensing.


That make the 2010-2011 Australian Government budget a truly historic budget.