New South Wales's iVote® system - an interview with Ian Brightwell

This is the second in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

If I had to pick someone to be in charge of developing an electronic voting system, I’d want them both to be highly skilled at technical project management and a passionate supporter of democracy.

Ian Brightwell fits both criteria in spades.

“My first voting experience was in 1974 when the Whitlam government was re-elected. Then in 1975, when this government was dismissed, I recall seeing people arguing in the street over politics, which I had not seen before and indeed not seen since.”

“After the dismissal in 1975 and before the election, no-one I knew said they would vote liberal, and then we saw a liberal landslide. It was at that point I realised the virtues of our electoral system and value of the secret ballot, allowing people to express their view without undue influence from others.”

As the CIO of the NSW Electoral Commission, Ian Brightwell is responsible not only for all of the commission’s IT infrastructure, but also for Australia’s most exciting online electronic voting initiative, the iVote® system.

The iVote® system is an internet-based voting platform which has been custom-built to support the NSW government’s requirement for remote voting at parliamentary elections. Under current legislation only electors with vision or physical disabilities and remote or voters absent from NSW on election day are entitled to use the system.

In 2011, the first time the iVote® system was used, some 46,684 electors used it while over 200,000 people are expected to use the system in the next state election in 2015.

Ian says that despite the limited number of voters currently entitled to use the iVote® system, it has already demonstrated its value.

In 2011, he says, there was a much larger group of out-of-state voters than they had seen in previous elections, as people didn't have to go to specific locations to vote.

Ian says he can see the iVote® system being expanded to other groups of voters in the future, but at this stage he is comfortable with using the platform for those voters the Commission find difficult to service– where it is hard to get to them manually –it also allows more time for the system to be refined before it is scaled.

One group Ian identified as a potential future target audience were postal voters.

The head of Australia Post has said that first class mail may not be available within 5 – 10 years as a result of Australia Post reducing postal services in line with declining demand. On this basis it is possible that all Australian jurisdictions with postal voting will need a replacement approach for future elections.

He also sees absent voting at local government elections as an area the iVote® system can help. This is particularly a concern because NSW’s Local Government legislation doesn’t permit absent voting at a council elections (this problem will be exacerbated if the proposal by Sydney City Council to require businesses to vote is enacted). For NSW local government elections there’s around 300,000 more non voters fined than at state elections because absent voters are not able to vote.

Another area of interest has been for plebiscites and ‘mini-polls’. Ian demonstrated the system at Parliament House in Sydney, primarily to minor party representatives. They were excited about the potential for using a system like iVote® to include more direct democracy in our system through polling voters on what they thought on different topics.

Ian isn’t sure this is necessarily a good idea, “I’m not sure voters are always well placed to make decisions on complex individual topics, due to the depth of material to absorb and the range of options, but it is an interesting proposition which needs further exploration.”

He believes that “voters are far better at picking the people they want to represent them for parliamentary decision-making.”

Ian does however believe that the iVote® system could be valuable for referendums, which he says there’s a current reluctance to run due to the cost, “the marginal cost of electronic voting, once the system is established, is much lower than that of paper voting.”

One area that Ian doesn’t see the iVote® system moving into any time soon, is replacing the local voting booth.

He believes paper voting is a key method for retaining confidence and trust in the electoral system – particularly given the concerns that have been raised overseas with electronic voting systems in physical locations.

Ian also said that, “for the most part with our current arrangement, replacing attendance paper voting with electronic attendance voting would be quite costly, and there would have to be clear set of benefits to offset that cost.”

Ian believes there isn’t a strong push for Australia to move to electronic attendance voting as there’s sufficient trust in the existing electoral system.

However, he says “with manual systems voters have to trust electoral authorities to do their job and although there is some ability for voters to see this in polling places there can be no evidence votes are finally counted as cast because the final count happens weeks later in remote offices and electors cannot observer this process.

However, with an electronic system you can provide the elector with a little more transparency, though they will have to understand the more complex electronic process to fully appreciate the verification information they have been provided – it’s a different kind of trust.”

Speaking of trust, the iVote® system has been designed with modern security to ensure that the system is as secure and unshakable as possible. Ian says they have updated the security and will conduct penetration testing to mitigate the risk of hacking at the 2015 election.

Also, he says, as the system is in place only during election periods, there’s a very limited window for a hacker to break through security and alter the results.

While no electronic system is perfect, he’s confident that his team has done everything possible to ensure that NSW voters using the iVote® system can trust that their vote will be recorded and counted accurately.

Ian says that the international experience has been that electronic voting isn’t a universal preference if offered to all electors anyway, “a few countries have offered electronic voting to all citizens, and have found that it peaks out at 20-30% of voters, with others preferring physical polling places or other forms of voting.”

“In Australia voting is a community and social activity and taking away a polling place from a small community can create enormous controversy and concern in the community.”

Ian thinks that we should not take away from physical voting or the opportunity for civic social contact, but definitely should offer a diversity of ways to vote, with electronic voting part of the mix.

In particular Ian said that there are issues with areas, with large and growing populations, where in older areas the available polling places can get overrun and newer areas there are no available venues for polling places. He says there is a need to manage the pressure on the attendance voting system which is already feeling over loaded.

While the iVote® system may not be used now to replace physical voting, this still leaves a large number of voters it can service. Ian says that these days 20-30% of votes are not attendance votes (in district votes in a polling places or pre-poll).

an also says that, from the data we have on voting patterns by voting channel, all voting channels generally have a similar electoral outcome. That is electoral commissions see similar voting trends across attendance, postal, absent voting channels. Electronic voting in NSW in 2011 was no exception, it gave a similar electoral outcome to other channels, so in the future this pattern should hold for other jurisdictions that choose to use electronic voting. This is a useful way of determining if major electoral fraud has occurred in just one voting channel.

While the iVote® system has been designed for NSW state voting, Ian’s team kept in mind that it could be used for local government voting in the future. He says that NSW has far less turnout for local elections, “we send out up to 300,000 more penalty notices for local government voting than for state voting.”

Ian also says that other states and territories are watching his team’s work closely, “we’ve had lots of interest from other states, federally and overseas, and expect interest to translate to some action after the next election.”

Looking into the future, Ian said that he didn’t see huge change in voting approaches in the next five to ten years, but expects an ongoing shift from postal to electronic and increasing levels of absent voting driving electronic voting.

He also sees increasing levels of early voting being the first avenue for attendance electronic voting being used “it is already immensely popular and we see 50-100% increase in early voting election on election - but parties hate it as they have to get their party volunteers there for 2-3 weeks prior to election day and it is hard for them to manage their election message. The public love it as it frees them up on election day. The reality is the public will win this one in the long run.”

Australia already has a very high voter participation rate, so while in the US electronic voting may be seen as a way to raise voting participation, Ian says that’s not a consideration in Australia, “as we have such a high participation rate we have has bipartisan support for electronic voting.”

You’ll be able to hear more from Ian at GovInnovate on 25-27 November in Canberra.

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Digital Disruption - an interview with Marie Johnson

This is the first in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

Marie Johnson, Managing Director of
the Centre for Digital Business

A few weeks ago I sat down with MarieJohnson to discuss her presentation at GovInnovate and the thinking behind it.

Marie is currently the Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer of the Centre for Digital Business, and as a passionate technologist and innovator has had career that has spanned Executive rolls in the corporate and public sectors.

She now advises senior public servants and corporate executives on the new capabilities required by business, government and society to meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital age.

Marie says that digital has been truly disruptive to society and is one of the most serious challenges to government administration in a century.

She believes there’s two forms of disruption, unpredictable and predictable.

The unpredictable kind includes real breakthroughs in technology and new and unique emerging business models that no foresight could have predicted.

The predictable kind result from a series of incremental changes over a relatively long time – a ‘long tail’ of disruption based on the evolution of known technologies and business models.

While unpredictable disruption is exactly that – unpredictable and therefore difficult to plan for, the predictable kind gives organisations with the appropriate horizon scanning approaches an opportunity to prepare.

In her view government hasn’t been paying enough attention to predictable forms of disruption, “some innovations have been brewing for awhile and should not be disruptive to government where it has been monitoring and horizon scanning.”

Marie worries that government hasn’t taken all the steps necessary to adequately prepare for known trends,

“Let’s have a look at, say, the government online strategy in 2000. It looked at moving everything online while maintaining face-to-face and hard copy channels.

The strategy in 2013 said exactly the same thing – placing all high volume transactions online, but keeping hard copy transactions as well.

There’s been no progression in strategy over that time, and implementation over the period has focused on channel switching, moving services and forms online with little business transformation.”

Marie says this could be because digital hasn’t been disruptive enough – governments in Australia have been able to stave off transformational change by creating workarounds to existing systems and processes.

However the longer transformational change is delayed, the more expensive it becomes and the more likelihood there is of ageing system failing and creating far greater disruption for governments and society.

This risk grows as governments fragment their service delivery channels, attempting to maintain existing approaches while also seeking to exploit emerging channels to citizens.

She believes there’s a real opportunity at the moment for governments to be transformational in their thinking, not just linear, making interactions with government more intuitive and seamless.

For instance, Marie says, “agencies should be required to declare what they are going to put online, and what they will be taking away.”

Marie used the example of car registration stickers. Now that police have number plate scanners and integrated registration databases, there’s little need for drivers to display a sticker on their windscreen providing details of their car registration.

She says that most drivers’ license authorities in Australia have now abandoned registration stickers, removing a lot of the process and policy that supported the issue, printing and management of the sticker process.

“Another example is in the work I did with Immigration. We took away the need to have a paper visa label in passports to enter Australia.”

Marie says that Australia didn’t require paper visas, but was issuing about two million of them a year due to a range of reasons including a preference by some travellers who wanted to have a paper visa as a tourism souvenir and proof of their visit.

This process involved substantial expense – the design and printing of visas, their storage and distribution, staff time in sticking them in passports and the overhead of having people come to Australian embassies Immigration posts to get them.

She says that after a review process to understand the extent of the cost of paper visas and the corresponding impact in focusing on electronic ones, the decision was made to set a price signal for paper visas.

Marie says that “the government passed legislation requiring a payment to get a paper label – the electronic visa is still required. Now the issuance of paper visas is almost negligible – saving printing, storage space, staff time, processing and more.”

Marie believes there’s many areas in government that could benefit from transformational rather than linear adoption of technology – changing the way systems and processes work, rather than simply replicating them digitally.

She also believes that the notion of citizen-centricity needs more consideration, “there is no citizen-centricity in government as every agency has a different viewpoint and interaction with citizens.”

Instead, she says, we need to have a discussion about what services we can replace or take away, and how we inform citizens about doing so.

“This isn’t about cutting essential services, but removing unnecessary complexity that feeds on itself.”

She sees this issue in how government defines and manages ‘ICT’ projects,

“Look at audits and capability reports over the last 15 years on government “ICT projects” – how they have failed to deliver, have been very expensive and, on occasion, led to policy failure.

We’re still having the same findings today – how can that be? Why hasn’t government improved and learnt from the past?”

In reality, she says, these are not ICT projects, they are focused on policy and service delivery and have simply been defined as ICT as they involve the use of technology to automate and integrate policy and service delivery.

“So when the Audit office looks at them and there’s a capability review, it looks at them primarily from an IT perspective and can overlook the real reasons for project failure or who should be updating and changing their approach.”

Marie says that agency ICT teams in government are under enormous stress, struggling under an increasing load of business as usual work, maintaining existing systems, with limited capital budgets for replacing legacy systems.

She says that many ICT teams are reaching the point where they have little or no capability to able to maintain existing systems, implement new business projects and innovate, “I think this is one of the challenges for the APS.”

She also says that the whole issue around the client/citizen experience has only recently started to be looked at.

“In the recent egovernment strategy, there is no mention of the client experience. Instead it speaks of heavy and light IT users and is very much a production view rather than looking at what that means for the delivery of policy and citizen experience.”

Marie says her question to agencies is, “can that egovernment strategy support the new welfare reforms from the government? My view is that it probably can’t.”

Marie believes government needs to focus more on becoming a platform, as increasing social complexity and advancing technology blurs and removes the lines between traditional portfolios.

“Where we have the connected car, RFID chipped livestock generating data and highly pervasive connected services – what does this mean for government services and government policy?”

“Rather than having each agency doing their thing independently and in a self-sufficient manner, like factories in the early industrial age, government needs to become more of a utility and a platform - actively sharing skills across policy and service delivery areas, rather than persisting as ‘stove-piped’ bureaucracies.”

Marie sees one of the biggest current areas of disruption as being in finance, with emerging mobile peer-to-peer payment models, crypto-currencies and crowd-lending already beginning to disrupt traditional banking and transaction models.

“We have a lot to learn with what is happening in growing markets such as Kenya, where innovative models of payment delivery are changing how financial systems and currencies operate.”

She says that in Kenya, a country with little in the way of infrastructure, phone-based peer-to-peer payments through a network of payment providers, called M-PESA, has become a leading characteristic of their economy.

Marie believes Australian bureaucrats need to look at how nations beyond the anglosphere are addressing modern challenges. She says there’s many areas in our government where public policy innovation could occur through learning from what’s happening in other countries.

In particular Marie says governments need to broaden the scope and range of inputs on policy development.

She discussed a case study from the UK’s Great Ormond Street Childrens’ Hospital (GOSH), which during the 1990s was trying to understand the very high mortality rates for surgery in congenital heart disease.

Doctors identified one high risk area being the patient’s transfer from the operating room to the ICU.

They identified this complex task as being analogous to that of a pit stop in Formula One, and doctors from GOSH visited a pit crew in action in Italy to gain insights into how hospital procedures could be improved.

In a pit stop a lollipop man waves in the car and oversees all the work done to get it back on the track. All the mechanics and technicians have clearly defined roles to perform concurrently, designed so as not to interfere with each other.

The doctors videotaped the handover process in GOSH and sent it to be reviewed by the Formula One team. Out of this analysis came a new handover procedure.

The anesthetist was given the same role as the lollipop man, to step back and look at the big picture, making safety checks.

These changes led to significant reduced errors and reduced mortality rates.

Marie says this type of cross-industry learning is vital for government – looking beyond traditional sources of advice and support, “Agencies can’t keep doing the same things and consulting the same people. We need to confront digital disruption.”

Finally Marie said that government should offer a user experience that is on par with the very best in any other domain.

She believes the reason this doesn’t happen is that there is a massive capability gap in government in what she calls ‘capability architecture’.

Marie says that different parts of government, agencies and groups in agencies do their own jobs well, however there is no one specifically trained, mandated and responsible for ensuring those jobs all align and fit into the larger architecture of a policy or service.

Instead, she says, they end up being connected together by manual workarounds, third parties and individuals accessing the services.

“In other words government is creating wonderfully designed parts, but not flawless systems.”

She sees a place for what she calls a ‘Transformation Commission’, responsible for future scanning and aiding agencies to adopt transformational techniques.

In conclusion Marie believes that that fossilised ICT systems that are not fit for purpose for the future are becoming a critical concern for agencies.

However if government can adopt a transformational approach to policy and service delivery, improve internal and external collaboration, improve its trend detection and reaction, and connect all these disparate threads together, Marie sees a much brighter future ahead.

You’ll be able to hear more from Marie at GovInnovate on 25-27 November.

More of Marie’s thinking is available through her blog posts, including:

• The Digital Disruption of Government https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140406120640-28199609-the-digital-disruption-of-government?trk=mp-reader-card
• Calling for Digital Disruption - Not Business as Usual https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140505143938-28199609-digital-disruption-not-business-as-usual?trk=mp-reader-card
• Digital Disruption & Welfare Reform https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140812035825-28199609-digital-disruption-welfare-reform?trk=mp-reader-card
• Digital Disruption Seen through 100’s of Audits & Reviews. https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140428161740-28199609-what-do-100-s-of-audits-reviews-inquiries-media-reports-over-the-past-decade-have-in-common?trk=mp-reader-card
• Not Even a Federal Budget Can Stop Digital Disruption https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140521000719-28199609-not-even-a-federal-budget-can-stop-digital-disruption?trk=mp-reader-card

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My views on copyright infringement (submitted to the MEAA)

Earlier today ZDNet reported on the Media and Arts Alliance's submission on copyright infringement, where the MEAA (as the peak body for journalists, actors, dancers, photographers and people working across the media) took a position that appeared to support internet filtering.

I have been a member of the MEAA for a number of years - it ensures me some level of protection should I break news in my blog, or in articles I write for other publications, should I report on stories involving whistleblowers.

As soon as I became aware of the MEAA's submission, and had read it in full, I tweeted that I was cancelling my membership , as the views did not reflect my values and views on the topic.

This afternoon the MEAA retracted its submission and committed to a broader member consultation, stating that it opposed an internet filter and censorship.

I've taken back my cancellation, and thought I would share the submission I've made to them regarding my views on copyright infringement.

Why is this being publishing in my eGovAU blog? There's two reasons.

Firstly copyright is a Gov 2.0 topic. Technology has allowed a significant proportion of the material that humans formerly created and distributed physically to be created and distributed digitally, creating enormous legal challenges in the copyright area that governments need to consider.

Government agencies must daily walk a delicate path themselves on how they access, reuse and publish citizen, corporate and their own copyright content - from consultation submissions and user comments on their facebook pages, to images in Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr and videos on YouTube.

Changing the default setting of copyright in government was a key step in enabling open data and remains an area of contention at many levels where agencies and councils are fearful of how material they create may be reused.

On top of this issues around copyright are beginning to step into the physical realm. With 3D printers it becomes possible for many objects to be replicated quickly and cheaply. This challenges the manufacturing sector and arts where registered designs or copyrights are used to protect the unique shape of a bottle, chair, tap, handle, cup or fork. It challenges resellers of parts for cars, toilets and other complex household objects, where it becomes easier to print the needed part than access it through a supplier.

Government needs to ensure it is ready for these challenges - who has the right to make copies of digital or physical assets, to distribute and sell them.


Secondly, copyright issues are one of the areas in which digital and physical norms collide. It's a key battlefield for society in shaping our cultural and legal norms into the future, with everyone having a stake by way of the content we purchase and consume.

It is important for those who wish to influence the future to be actively involved in this debate.


Here's my response to the MEAA:

In looking at copyright infringement online, there's three issues that need to be tackled: 

1. Appropriate access to content
2. Appropriate pricing of content
3. Circumvention of legal access to content 

Taking them one at a time... 

1) Appropriate access to content
It is in the interests of both copyright holders and the community for copyright content to be readily available on a timely basis to the community through appropriate access channels. 

In today's connected world, the time value of content has changed significantly. When content is made available for the first time, anywhere in the world, it immediately becomes the topic of discussion and analysis by the audiences able to access it. 

Where content is held back from certain audiences, such as when television episodes are screened first in Australia days, weeks or years after they are first screened in the US or UK, the time value of this content is greatly diminished, with the Australian audience having ready access to online commentary and reviews which can inadvertently spoil the significant reveals in the content. 

This reduces the value of the material to Australian distributors and audiences, many of whom will choose not to watch content for which they already know the outcome. 

Then, over time, some content's value will increase again as people seek to own it for viewing whenever they please. In this case, where physical stockists choose not to stock this content audiences will seek to find it via other channels, such as overseas stockists online or via websites such as the Pirate Bay. 

Content that is available more rapidly after first screening, and is easily purchasable at any stage from first screening via online or physical stockists, will be more widely consumed, benefiting both the copyright holder and the community. 

Therefore any action on copyright infringement needs to reduce the access gap, ensuring that content is available as soon as possible following first screening, both for immediate consumption and ownership purposes. 

A good example of how this has been done well was with the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, where the ABC added the content to iView as it was being screened in the UK, and it was then made available through cinemas throughout the day of release. 

This significantly increased the return to the copyright holder, while satisfying the needs of the Australian community who did not have to suffer the frustration of accidentally discovering the plot online while waiting weeks, months, or even years, for the content to become available to them. 

A good example of where this has been done badly has been for the last series of Game of Thrones, where the content could only be accessed legally through Foxtel, at a time that Foxtel deemed appropriate. This was only available in packages which meant that people would have to pay a significant amount of money to simply access a single program, making it uncommercial for households and causing significant community frustration. The series was not even rapidly available for download after screening due to a deal to lock down access. 

As a result the copyright holder missed out on significant potential revenue for the program in Australia and the community became more normalised on bypassing media channels to seek illicit means of accessing content, with more learning how to use torrent and online viewing sites (such as Channel131)


2) Appropriate pricing of content
The second significant factor in copyright infringement is the price barrier to content consumption. Australians pay excessive amounts for many forms of digital content, ranging from audio-visual material through to software. 

The 'Australian premium' paid on content (for example, averaging 33% on iTunes and 25% for movies) is now visible to Australians due to the internet exposing the relative prices of content paid around the world. 

Australian content distributors have resisted these claims, claiming that copyright holders control the price, further aggravating the Australian community, who can see services such as Hulu and Netflicks are able to offer content faster and cheaper than local distributors. 

This has led many Australians to use easy tools to bypass geographic zoning by IP address to access Hulu and Netflicks, or establish US and UK accounts on iTunes and similar services to access content that is more highly priced in Australia.
While it is understandable that Australian distributors seek to maximise their profits, this is a short-term strategy that encourages Australians to seek alternative ways to access content. 

This is not only concerning for the ongoing existence of local distributors, but also impacts the tax base, where content is purchased from overseas or accessed illicitly. 

Any program for reducing copyright infringement must seriously tackle the issue of content pricing in Australia, ensuring that Australians pay a fair price for digital content where there is no additional transport or content distribution costs. 

Without this effort, any form of penalty-based infringement approach will fail and more than fail - driving more and more Australians to establish international accounts in order to access content cost-effectively (without infringement) and thereby undermining local content distributors in the mid-long term.

3) Circumvention of legal access to content
The notion that instituting a penalty-based approach to copyright infringement will solve the issue of piracy is flawed while the issues of access and price are unresolved. 

Australian copyright holders and distributors need to stop attempting to use legal and political means to stave off the collapse of their industry, and adapt their business models to the new realities - content is abundant, digital content is easily distributable and people will pay a fair price for content where it is available on the channels they want, when they want. 

Establishing technical barriers to accessing content is flawed as individuals can use tools such as TOR to bypass identification approaches and access content from overseas services. 

Only a minority of Australians use Torrent-based tools for downloading content (and predominantly these are not reliant on sites like the Pirate Bay to access and download content). 

Many Australians also use services such as Channel 131 and watchseries.lt which allow viewing of content on demand without downloading while featuring advertising from Australian companies. 

While blocking the IP addresses for these sites is physically possible, it runs the risk of blocking hundreds of thousands of other sites using the same IP addresses. Also the process for these sites to change IP takes seconds, rendering any IP-blocking approach ineffective. 

When looking at the issuance of notices by ISPs and the retention of data for detection of copyright infringement, this would purely be undertaken at the behest of the organisations who claim to be suffering loss, copyright holders and distributors. 

As such expecting ISPs to pay the charges and costs associated with this effort is inappropriate and represents a blatant attempt by the copyright lobby to transfer its costs to another industry while pocketing any profit increases it receives as a result. 

That's predatory behaviour and is totally inappropriate, similar to holding Australia Post responsible for the cost of opening every package and issuing notices where it found DVDs illicitly parallel imported. 

Even worse is the notion of restricting internet access to households where infringement is detected. This approach could severely penalise people unconnected with infringement, particularly in share houses, in family situations and where wifi hijacking is taking place, not to mention the likelihood that every free public wifi network would disappear in short order. 

Several countries have already added internet access as a human right and while this hasn't yet happened in Australia, there are many ways in which losing access to the internet, or reducing internet access speeds, severely disadvantages individuals and households - in areas from education to health care, employment and even prevents legal and paid access to content that copyright holders make available online. 

If the copyright industry wishes to chase individuals for copyright infringement they are welcome to do so. If their concern is that they'll look bad, well tough. There is no legal or moral justification for copyright holders to make ISPs the bad guys in order to preserve their own images. 

Overall, copyright infringement is not the black and white situation that copyright holders in Australia seek to make it appear. Their claims of loss have been proven to be vastly overstated (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Piracy-China-USITC-RIAA-MPAA,news-7120.html) and their refusal to provide timely and fairly priced access to content is a leading reason why Australians are choosing to use illicit means to access content. 

If the copyright industry wishes to reduce infringement, it must take steps to improve content access and pricing. It must also demonstrate a commitment to using Australia's existing laws to crackdown on any residual copyright infringement. 

Only if these approaches fail to impact on the level of infringement activity would it be acceptable to consider additional infringement powers - and these should be at the cost of the organisations who will profit from compliance, the copyright holders and distributors.

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Kudos to Queensland government for taking a fun approach to their Premiers Awards for Open Data

Some of you might be aware that at the red carpet event for GovHack 2014 in Brisbane, the Queensland government's Assistant Minister to the Premier on e-government, Ray Stevens, announced the Premiers Awards for Open Data.

The Awards are a competition to come up with the best use of the 1,400 datasets released by the queensland government as open data in their data.qld.gov.au open data catalogue.

The competition has $77,000 in prizes up for grabs, and is fully international, open to anyone, anywhere in the world, without a requirement for any team members to be based in Queensland.

The competition is open until 26 September - so get your entries in.

Now to the kudos - normally these types of government open data competitions are rather dull affairs, with little in the way of fun or exciting promotion.

In this case however, Queensland has gone a little further than other states or countries, making a promotional video that takes a step away from the technical talk and has a little fun in the process while costing next to nothing.

It's the kind of approach we need to see more of from government - a little rough, a little fun and very sincere. View it below, then don't forget to enter!

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92% of Australia's federal politicians now use Facebook and/or Twitter

I've been tracking the number of Australian Federal politicians using Australia's leading social channels for two years now, seeing the number using at least one of Facebook and Twitter grow from 79% in April 2012 to 90% in November 2013 to a current level of 92%.

What's even more interesting is in the details, which you'll find in my thoughts below.

 To access the raw data and statistics, go to my latest Google Doc at: docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdFhaQ1gzdzg3d1VWcFJpSl91bkQwbWc&usp=sharing

While the overall use of social media is at 92.48%, or 209 out of 226 federal politicians (150 Members of the House of Representatives and 76 Senators), the situation is very different between the houses.

The House of Representatives has a far greater level of social media use at 95.33% compared to the Senate at 86.84%. The gap has remained consistent with my last review in November 2013, where it was 92.67% compared to 85.14%. Senators, on average, are slightly older than Representatives (51.55yrs versus 50.19yrs), which is likely a factor, as is the consideration that Senators don't campaign in the same way as Representatives due to the difference in how they are elected and who they represent (states/territories, not electorates).

I still believe that Senators are missing a trick here - due to their different responsibilities in most cases they represent much larger electorates and thus social media can be of value for listening to and engaging with people they can't as easily drive out to see face-to-face.

This rationale also carries over to Representatives with geographically large electorates, such as in the NT, WA, SA and Qld.

I am particularly glad to see that the Nationals, who focus on rural and regional seats and were previously the party whose elected politicians were least likely to engage online, has picked up their act in this area, and 19 of their 20 elected members now uses social media, a greater proportion that either Labor or Liberals (and I count Qld LNP Nationals as Nationals federally).

Social media remains very important for smaller parties to get their message out, with the Greens maintaining their 100% use of social media and every other minor party (KAP, PUP, DLP, Family First) and independent politician using social to some extent.

I see the same trends we've seen in previous years from politicians, and the population in general, still hold true.

Similar to my past reviews, female politicians are more likely to use social channels than male politicians, though by a smaller margin (4% rather than 7%) than previously.


Equally, the older a politician is, the less likely they are to engage on social media, with a clear divide by decade.


This reflects the same phenomenon as we see in the community - with politicians aged 60+ far less likely to use online channels for engagement, and those aged under 45 likely to use it as one of their primary ways to communicate and collect information.

This tends to suggest that the maturity of political decisionmaking regarding the internet is likely to continue to improve as older politicians retire and younger digital natives take their place.

For your reviewing pleasure, below is an infographic with some of the key statistics, please have a play with the interactive elements - they provide an interesting view of how actively different groups of politicians engage via Twitter and Facebook.

Australian Federal politicians - Twitter and facebook use - AUG 14 | Create Infographics

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