Labor raids IT piggybank to grease election promises Labor will cut Australia's IT budget to pay for election pledges. This is how it will work. The Gillard government expects to save more than $1bn over four years through better procurement practices introduced by the IT efficiency expert Peter Gershon in 2008. The savings were to be "quarantined" to fund new IT projects. But …
...would have been helpful there? This is a British site and it is clear that it does not relate to the current British government. However, the article helpfully neglects to point out to where it is referring. I suspect it is Australia off the top of my head but surely the article should say where?
Hello there, thanks for the feedback.
We are running a short term experiment with some localised content in Australia - and geo-targeting publication on the front page. Obviously, the story goes out on RSS everywhere.
So I am interested in where you saw this article.
Drew
This post has been deleted by its author
Relax - we have done this with two articles, and we may do this with two or three more - this is additional content for Australia, not content suppressed for Australia. In other words, all other stories produced by The Register appear as usual.
As I said, this is an experiment. In our experience, except where stories about local phone and TV companies are concerned, IT pros have a fairly global news agenda.
Geo-targetting is nice, but when nobody knows its happening it makes things a little confusing. I would imagine that anybody from Oz would be similarly the article to relate to Britain unless specified otherwise although they probably at least recognised the named people.
Perhaps some kind of 'localized news' category, or special marking on the page could be used to indicate that this article is intended for a particular area?
"... cut Australia's IT budget..." should indicate it, but your point is well taken that it's a bit muddled and unclear.
The "Gershon Report" was noted here for mostly telling the government to fire the armies of incompetent consultants with their snouts in the feeding troughs and hire more Australians as full-time employees and pay them well.
That bit was conveniently ignored. Natch. Instead they focus on the other cost cutting measures.
However, in all fairness, if Labor is re-elected they will spend some $30billion on the NBN and its related ICT projects. Plus some $10billion from Telstra. Though I expect most of that will be used to dig up the country for new fiber lines, thus keeping their cronies in the construction unions happy.
Yes, they will. After Telstra didnt put in an original tender and other Australian companies who could do it did. Then, instead of accepting the best tender, they went back to telstra, somehow thinking they are the only ones who can do it (totally false), and then telstra submit the tender with no justification for the over $40 billion (obviosly thinking 'well if they accept this is worth it to us!). So at the end of the day with over $40 billion being thrown around willy nilly, this original point is almost insignificant.
Such a pitty neither major party is any good with IT :( We'd all better vote for the smaller partys and pick the one which sounds the best, who advertise they will preference the way you prefer.
and dont get me started on the intent to censor the net, which has been pushed back until after the election (convenient). It sucks big time that both partys will likely do the same thing, and despite being a democracy there is nothing I can do about it!
Well, that'll be mean "moving forward" by using more government contracted curry munchers on dodgy 457 visas.
Looks like the "other stuff" the Ranga will spend the money on is redundancy pay for Aussies who won't work $12.50/hr.
@Drewc: I noticed the Oz flag sitting up on the right of the Reg banner,
couldn't figure out what it was doing there until I read your comment.
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