IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

The regime will require them to store for two years customer internet and phone "metadata" for law-enforcement and intelligence agency access.

On Christmas Eve, telco industry body the Communications Alliance sent its members – including Telstra, Optus and Vodafone – an email requesting they fill out a survey with a deadline of January 9 on how much it will cost them to implement the scheme, giving them only nine business days to respond.

The intention is to make the services more convenient for elderly people and families, said Department of Human Services General Manager Hank Jongen.

The University of Queensland’s Health-e-Regions telehealth project aims to save patients from the stress, costs and inconvenience of travelling significant distances to see a specialist in a major city.

The move will further strengthen border security and identity checking processes, the Australian immigration Minister Chris Bowen said.

“Biometric data is widely used in the international community as an effective tool to manage visa and immigration processes, improve identity management and combat fraud,” Mr Bowen said.

Lindsay Tanner, Minister for Finance and Deregulation said: “Over the four years this study has been undertaken we have seen successive increases in use of the internet as a tool to interact with government.”

Last year, 38,718 Australian passports were reported to have been stolen or be missing, up from 38,689 the previous year.

There aren't any formal proposals on the table yet, but Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is keen on the idea, which came out of an innovation challenge run by her department.

Instead, the opposition party committed to spending money to speed up internet access to schools – but it seems there is no similar plan to deliver internet access to link doctors, medical providers and hospitals to the proposed ‘fibre-to-the-node’ network.

The Department of Health and Ageing today confirmed to ZDNet Australia that everyone would be assigned an identifier by tomorrow, matching the government's original 1 July roll-out date.

"It is planned that identifiers for individuals will be allocated within the Healthcare Identifier system (run by Medicare Australia) on 1 July 2010," the department said. "Consumers do not need to do anything for this process to occur."

These days more and more Australian households have access to broadband services, and this has resulted in more people doing a wide variety of things online. It is no surprise to learn, therefore, that a rising number of Australians have been interacting with the government online, and in 2009n a record number of Australians went online to interact with the government.

The recent National Press Club debate between the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Christopher Pyne, and his Labor counterpart Kim Carr reinforced that both sides of government want to be seen as owning the innovation high ground. Unfortunately, neither has offered anything new to the voters on the subject.

Our ability to commercialise our innovations will really make a difference to the economy. Factors like research funding, forging links between businesses and a stable operating environment are all going to play their part.

The independent study commissioned by Infosys, a global leader in business consulting and technology solutions, polled 5,000 consumers in five countries (including 1,000 in Australia) to probe consumer attitudes about sharing data with healthcare providers, retailers and banks.

Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) has warned Australians not to opt-in to the Federal Government’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system due to concerns about insufficient security protections for users’ personal information.

According to AusCERT general manager, Graham Ingram, the focus of the Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) in securing the back-end IT systems supporting the PCEHR have been at the expense of ensuring the security of users at the point of access. As such, Australians using the PCEHR face the risk of identity theft.

As one of the key issues differentiating the major parties in the upcoming election (the Coalition is threatening to axe investment in electronic health records if elected) the report sheds a little more light on Australians’ perception about electronic health records.

Nine in ten Australians are willing to hand over biometric details including fingerprints when travelling across international borders, according to an Accenture survey.

However, survey respondents conditioned the exchange on transparent explanations about security and privacy.

A total of $467 million will be funded by the Rudd government for over the next 2 years in an effort to provide every Australian who desires an electronic health record by July 2012.

This is according to a poll conducted on behalf of the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), which showed that 82% of respondents believe an IEHR would save lives and improve health services by having important medical information immediately assessable.

The campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali has criticised RANZCOG for contemplating the possibility of allowing "ritual nicks", a limited form of female circumcision, says the Daily Telegraph.

Australiens Regierung will einen Fahrplan für die Entwicklung der digitalen Wirtschaft des Landes erarbeiten. Dabei will sie auch die Bürger einbeziehen: Sie können auf einer Website ihre Meinung zur digitalen Zukunft des Landes äußern.

Die australische Regierung wird für 43 Milliarden Australische Dollar (23 Milliarden Euro) ein landesweites Glasfasernetzwerk errichten. Die gemeinsam mit Privatunternehmen geführte National Broadband Network Corporation versorgt 90 Prozent der Haushalte mit 100-MBit/s-Zugängen.