Australian Senator Kate Lundy Speech at the Launch of the Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy Report

Date: 25 August 2009

Read a transcript of Australian Senator Kate Lundy's speech at the launch of the Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy report:

I am very pleased to be here, as this is an important area - along with metadata - which is close to my heart - and an area that I think will contribute significantly to transforming how government interacts with and serves citizens all over the world.

Spatial data is an extremely important, but often overlooked component in modern services delivery, collaboration tools and archival. I'll briefly touch on each of these areas as but a few demonstrable examples of the usefulness of spatial data.

Spatial data contributes to services delivery by helping facilitate a user-centric, or in the case of government, a citizen-centric delivery of information and services. A citizen's location is a simple and relatively anonymous identifier through which the most appropriate local services, such as the local Council or medical facilities can be presented.

Collecting and sharing spatial data across agencies helps with consolidating and correlating projects both externally and internally, which means government agencies across the spheres of government can be better informed about other agency projects, and areas of potential collaboration.

In relation to archival, collecting and maintaining geospatial metadata of data and projects - whether that be the location of authorship or the various geocoded information therein - is vital for ensuring future probity as well as the geographical context of the data. When you consider the value of historical records combined with modern Web 2.0 mapping mashup tools, this becomes extremely important for research, learning and for citizens to engage in their own histories.

Open access to spatial data is important, particularly as open standards and with permissive copyright conditions as this provides opportunities for innovation:

• Private innovation - Australian companies can value-add to government spatial data and create opportunities for themselves and the Australian economy. The competitive differentiator becomes how data is presented, collated, and delivered in useful ways, rather than the data itself.
• Public innovation - there are many communities of interest and even individuals who can leverage publicly available data to create useful services. For example there is a new website looking at how many Australian politicians use Twitter, and you can put your postcode in and see whether your local member is Tweeting. Or OpenStreetMaps, a community initiative providing street map data which is then used by many community driven projects such as translated maps, as well as some high profile use cases, such as for the Obama administration at http://whitehouse.gov/change

Government has several responsibilities in this area:

• To ensure open access to government owned spatial data for public and private innovation.
• The ensure appropriate spatial data is captured for government projects and data.
• To understand how it can support this rapidly growing industry.
• To collaborate with both public and private interests to ensure spatial data helps citizens. An example we need to learn from is the Victorian bushfires. If there were well understood and practiced mechanisms for sharing government spatial data, perhaps public and private interests could have leveraged the government data to assist in helping Australians throughout and after the crisis.
• To engage in spatially enabled Gov 2.0 initiatives to both improve government services, and to encourage industry development in this area.

So what is happening in Australia?

In Australia we have some incredible Gov 2.0 initiatives which are strongly leveraging spatial data:

• The Australian Government Economic Stimulus Plan website. Citizens can find projects in their local area - http://www.economicstimulusplan.gov.au/
• The Office of Spatial Data Management (OSDM) has made made data sets freely available. Their recent Spatial@Gov conference has a fantastic array of case studies in Australia which you can read on their websitel. One of their projects is the "Interoperability demonstration" which shows many example data sets on a map that can we switched on and off for easy information browsing.
• In September the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) will be running their annual conference, which should be interesting. http://www.gita.org.au/
• In October Australia is hosting the global Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial conference (FOSS4G) which is a 4 day conference with some of the most innovative people from around the world in this space, and it would be well worth attending. http://2009.foss4g.org
• I also want to briefly point out the importance of the industry/government action agenda established in 2001 in Australia. The action agenda was an important step towards developing Australia's Spatial Data Infrastructure. www.anzlic.org.au/get/2358011765.pdf
• This was an initiative enthusiastically supported by the then Industry Minister Nick Minchin, illustrating the strong bipartisan support for the spatial industry. I remember at the time how hard the spatial industry worked to get this agenda up and running.
• I also just want to mention that I was very pleased to learn that New Zealand has joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-si). This builds on the strong cross-Tasman relationship that we already have through the Australia New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC), and New Zealand joining the Coperative Research Centre fopr Spatial Information (CRC-si) strenghtens the initiative to create a Australia/New Zealand market place for all spatial data and services. More information on this can be found on page 7 of the August edition of Landmark magazine, and I'll post a link in this speech on my website.

I look forward to learning more about what is happening in New Zealand, and also to do my part in fostering cross-Tasman relations in this space. We have many clever people in both our wonderful countries, and it would be great to collaborate and become a hub of excellence for the region, and the world.

Thank you.

For more information see the:

• Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy full report (PDF, 1.64MB)
• Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy section on this website