ISOC-AU Federal Election 2001

Aussie cultural heritage

Australian Democrats

yet to receive

Australian Labor Party

yet to receive

Liberal and National Parties

The Coalition's Strategic Framework for the Information Economy recognises the myriad of opportunities that exist to “promote the integrity and growth of Australian content and culture in the information economy”. Accordingly, consistent with the Coalition's commitments, Australian national cultural institutions are developing information technology initiatives to establish a whole-of-government information management framework. The aim is to ensure that the Australian public and international online visitors gain better, faster and more timely access to online collections and government information.

The process of digitising national collections and archives is well under way, and demonstrates the Coalition Government's commitment in this domain. Some examples include:

• AMOL, is a national online portal that provides access to Australia's rich national cultural identity contained in over 1000 digitised collections held in regional and national institutions throughout Australia.
• National Library of Australia (NLA) is amongst most advanced in terms of building the infrastructure capacity to digitise its collection, developing the policy framework to support issues of access and the surrounding regulatory frameworks incorporating for example, intellectual property protection mechanisms;
• Picture Australia, an online database of images from many significant heritage and cultural collections
• The National Gallery of Australia provides online access to its collection records, and (at the current time) selected images from the collection.

In April this year the National Archives of Australia commenced a process whereby researchers anywhere in the world could seek digital copies of records that are listed on the Archives database. The records are digitised using commercially-available personal digital cameras and loaded onto the Archives database via software written by the Archives. This system is a world first and digital images are available free of charge to the requesting researcher and anyone else who calls the images up on the website . As at 30 September 2001, 442,600 images had been loaded.

The Greens

The Internet remains the sole part of the mass-media in which content is not yet controlled by a handful of powerful corporations; proposals which will help maintain this independence have our general support. Increased support for local content industries, and enhanced protection against globalised intellectual property interests is a key part of the Greens Arts policy.

The Greens support a more open and competitive content industry in all aspects of broadcasting, including broadband internet. We would not oppose carefully targetted incentives to content creators (either direct, or via the taxation system) if these were identified as needed.