Vodcast: Kate’s Monthly Wrap #1

Senator Lundy does her first monthly wrapup including a snapshot of Kate’s recent ACT, Parliamentary and ICT activities and campaigns.

Transcript

Kate’s Monthly Wrap #1

Welcome to this vodcast. I’m trying something new again and I’d like to be able to present a monthly wrapup. What I’ve been doing over the last part of the month and what I’ve planning to do over the next month.

ACT News

There’s been a lot going on in my own constituency, the Australian Capital Territory. On my website, I’m running a campaign for ComSuper recipient, and Defence Pension recipients. We’ve had fantastic traffic and interest on the site with many people posting their views. I’m making sure that the Minister responsible, Mr Lindsay Tanner, is hearing those views and I’ll be asking questions in Parliament on those issues very soon.

Other things that have been happening here is of course the Federal Parliaments expenditure on the Stimulus Package. The Canberra community, like every other in Australia, needs that stimulus to keep our economy ticking over and I’m really pleased to see so many of our local schools for example receiving some of that money, and trades people getting the work to get those upgrades done.

Public Sphere updates

One of the interesting things about my job is that Parliament doesn’t sit all of the time, so when Parliament is not sitting, I do a range of things and of course we’ve been focusing on the wrap up from our previous Public Sphere event (about Gov 2.0) over the last month or so and just over the last few days we’ve been able to release the final PDF that contains all of the policy suggestions and a review of the actual Public Sphere event itself.

Most of you will remember that the government launched its Gov 2.0 Taskforce at our Public Sphere event.

Parliamentary updates

So over the next month we’ve got a couple of weeks before sitting in Parliament for two weeks. In the leadup to that sitting period I’m involved in two Senate Enquiries, the Broadband Select Committee – which is an ongoing committee looking at the National Broadband Network – and another committee, the Environment, Communications and Arts Senate Committee which will be enquiring into the first bill that the government is putting forward to facilitate the rollout of the National Broadband Network.

So a strong focus on the telecommunications system and Labor’s plans for the future. Following that we have two weeks of sitting and the legislation consideration in the House, I think, will be focused on the Emissions Trading Scheme and in the Senate I’m particularly looking forward to the discussion and debate around the FOI legislation and the accompanying bill on the Information Commissioner.

Government ICT programs

So in addition to what we’ve been doing here in Parliament, there have been lots of other things happening across ICT. There’s the ongoing ICT Reform Program arising out of the Gershon Review. There’s been some developments there that I’ll be focusing on a little later in a further vodcast.

There’s also the announcement by Stephen Conroy about the Digital Economy Futures. I wasn’t able to attend the launch personally in Sydney but I know it went really well and that document will provide a great framework for future policy development for the Digital Economy in Australia. And this, when linked to the National Broadband Network is an essential piece of work that will ensure Australia can really reap the economic benefits that ought to come out of the biggest investment in our National Broadband Network.

General News

We’ve got our National ALP Conference in Sydney this month. It’s three days of intensive debate about motions and our national platform this’ll place us in good stead leading into an election year next year.

References and feedback

Finally if you’d like more information about the Senate Committees, or House Committees, or the legislation program, you can go to www.aph.gov.au and search on each of those committees for more information. If there’s any specific you’d like me to include in my monthly wrapups, please let me know and I’ll look forward to doing it each month.

Tagged: ACT, ALP, digital economy, Gershon, gov20, government, ICT, ICT Reform Program, Public Sphere, super