The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove (abc.net.au)

Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: A digital archive and research tool developed by the Australian National Archives may be the victim of upcoming budget cuts. Used by an estimated 70,000 users per day, the system may be eliminated thanks to a $20 Million (AUD) budget cut to the agency's budget. Since its 2009 launch, Trove has grown to house four million digitised items, including books, images, music, historic newspapers and maps. Critics of the cuts say that such systems should be considered national infrastructure because there's literally no replacement service.

Comments

Anti intellectual government.

[sg_oneill]

This should be no surprise to anyone watching the current conservative governments attack on research and academia in australia.

The world renowned CSIRO has been gutted with climate research all but abandoned along with oceanographic research, which is a *big problem* when your an island nation entrusted to the care of the dying barrier reef. The government has stripped funding out of education and universities, removed scientific advisors from all levels of government, and often replaced them with spiral eyed religious idiots who see more value in quoting the bible than quoting peer reviewed research.

And now they are going after the history archives.

Standard bureaucrat protection technique.

[thesupraman]

Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.

That is how these things usually go. Publicly funded hospitals always cut patient services before anything else, Schools increase staff/child ratios, Transport cuts services at peak times, etc.

The only thing worse is unionised public servants, who really are on the double-take, since there is little downside to their bosses paying them more as it is 'free' money, and they get the double whammy of working for a votes government, AND having union muscle.

Welcome to another facet of the bleeding dry of the working middle class.

Um, what else do you cut?

[rsilvergun]

Man am I sick of the myth of bureaucratic waste. Did it ever cross your mind that the reason cuts start in those places is that there were most of the cost is? There's this belief (instilled by right wing think tanks looking to gut the commons for their own profit) that there's this magic "waste" that can be cut without impacting the quality of service and life.

The worst words I've ever heard are "I'm from the gov't and I'm hear to help". It wasn't a man from the gov't saying those (one of those paid my friends insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes), it was a right wing politician looking to cut some billionare's taxes and pushing more bullshit austerity for everyone but themselves.

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[bloodhawk]

There is a massive amount of government waste, I see it everyday while working within various government departments. The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus. You have government employees with "safe" comfortable positions that don't mandate performance and have no consequences for lack of performance as they are heavily union protected, Their is massive Machinery of Government spending purely to reward ministers with bigger portfolios to match ego's (some of this spending is absolutely insane and how the fuck it is ever justified to spend X million just to make a ministers portfolio bigger is beyond me).

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[ultranova]

There is a massive amount of government waste, I see it everyday while working within various government departments.

And there's a massive amount of waste on the private sector too. I see it every day in all jobs but my own. The reason is that I only see the surface of those other jobs from the outside. Every single time I've tried to do one, I've found out that there simply isn't any better way to do it - any possible speedup requires taking risks or shortcuts which will come back to bite you.

The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.

It is ironic that the push for efficiency can lead to the opposite result. But the solution is not to push harder, but lighter. Let the department carry over their unused budget to the next fiscal year, and now they have an actual motive to save money because it's now "their" money - and it also means they can build up savings to use for emergencies and larger projects.

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[sumdumass]

Budget burning as it is called is still wasteful if they keep the funds rather than send it back. For instance if your department has a 1 million surplus, that million can be used more effective either doing something else government should be doing or staying in the hands of taxpayers who will increase economic activity and thereby increase future revenue. But if it sits in an account because you didn't need it, neither will happen and your department will simply be over funded yet again the next year making it a hoarding situation.

What needs to happen is accurate budgeting and the ability to justify going over budget. If your budget more than needed, justify the difference as a one time thing and not have a cut on the next year's budget. But if the surplus is permanent like say technology allows two process to be combined into one or the demographics of the area changed and not as many people are using your department, there is no need to maintain the surplus amounts and there should be a cut.