Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/14/vulture_souths_linebyline_australian_budget_dissection/

Vulture South's line-by-line Australian budget dissection

Games funding goes, NICTA told to stand alone and weird software savings

By Simon Sharwood

Posted in Legal, 14th May 2014 00:07 GMT

Australia's 2014/15 budget was handed down last night. The headline items are already well-known: cuts to family payments, a temporary tax hike for the one per cent, money galore for roads thanks to the reinstatement of petrol levy indexing.

As usual, the budget contained no headline technology-related issues. Also as usual, the devil is in the detail as we found by reading lots of Portfolio Budget Statements and making a line-by-line trawl through new spending commitments detailed in the budget papers.

The big technology-related items include a policy titled Transitioning NICTA to a self-sustainable model. Long story short, NICTA won't get any cash after 2015/16, by which time it is expected to stand on its own two fiscal feet.

NBN Co will not get any government cash after 2017/18. By 2018/19 it will need to raise its own money to finish off the network.

The Privacy Commission will lose its standalone status, with its Commissioner becoming “... an independent statutory position within the Australian Human Rights Commission.” That change comes about because the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will be closed as of 1 January 2015.

Here's what we've found that impacts the technology industries, or is of interest to Reg readers, in the Budget's Expense Measures:

There's lots of stuff in the portfolio statements, too. The Department of Communications, for example, reports savings of $3.44bn over four years thanks to “Reforms to APS manag ement and efficient procurement of agency software.” The Department of Finance has a line item totalling $3.138bn for the same thing. We'll try to dig into the discrepancy between those two figures and also to dig out any other nuggets of interest. &reg