The Bureau of Statistics would not like being compared to a British tabloid. But there is a similarity.
Both are publishers. Both have very labour-intensive methods of gathering the material they want to publish. I use word “”material” rather than “”facts” because we are talking about a British tabloid.
Further, they both produce in a way that the first copy sold is hellishly expensive but all subsequent copies are dirt cheap.
The Sun with virtually no classified-ads is quite thin compared to an Australian weekend paper, for example, and newsprint is very cheap.
The bureau’s CD publication of the 1991 census material is the same _ high cost of the first pressing and then less than $10 for each subsequent CD. The ratios are extraordinary.
Murdoch charges 100 times the cost of production of additional copies of the Sun. The bureau charges about 1000 times the cost of production of additional costs of its census CD.
In the bureau’s case one CD that costs less than $10 to produce is sold for $10,500.
The tragedy is that the bureau’s CD is something of great social and economic value and should be more widely circulated. That cannot be said of Murdoch’s Sun.
Further, the bureau’s publication was created with public money.
I have no argument with a reasonable cost-recovery program, but it has to be balanced with the government’s professed freedom-of-information philosophy and a general requirement that the government act in the general public interest.
The bureau can easily justify selling its census CD at $10,500 to private companies that want to make a fast buck selling overcoats and electric blankets to over 70-year-old recent arrivals in Tasmania from Queensland. However, it gets a bit silly when such a brilliant tool is not made readily available to government bodies and non-profit community groups working in the general public interest.
The bureau has done a technically superb job in putting the CD together, but it is hiding it under a $10,500 price tag.
Meanwhile, over at the Department of Health, Housing, Local Government and Community Services, a consultant, Prometheus Information Ltd, is collecting and manipulating data (largely from the census) for its HealthWiz program to supply to the information-poor _ the community groups, local governments, and health- and welfare-providers.
They acknowledge that the bureau gives them the raw data at a reasonable price, but wonder why the information-poor are shut out from the bureau’s census CD.
The bureau says it has a cost-recovery program for all its publications and that’s what it costs. That position is just justified when dealing with commercial purchasers.
HealthWiz which runs on el-cheapo DOS computers with small hard disks and one floppy drive is a table creator, in a similar way as the bureau’s CD. Users can create tables intersection data like age group, sex, disease incidence, mortality, birthplace, residence, ethnicity, education and so on. It helps service providers work out present and future health and welfare needs and work out trends.
The basic pack is about $500 with extra disks of specialist information. (GPO Box 2319, Canberra, ACT 2601).
There is no uniform government policy on provision of information, even internally.
The Commonwealth Managers Toolbox, for example, should be available on network or disk to every Commonwealth officer who has a computer, but it is not, because the Department of Finance insists that agencies buy it, and some agencies prefer to spend their money on other things.
It is ludicrous. Once the information is gathered and put on the first CD or other electronic storage device, that is the end of the costs. All extra copies are dirt cheap. Any pricing based on average cost can only be a guestimate.
The trouble is that a lot of government information has both social and commercial applications. Census data, for example, is useful for people flogging off things to young, old or rich markets. It is also useful for social planners. The set of Commonwealth law reports is useful for lawyers on fabulous fees and to those doing legal research.
In forcing the former to pay, the latter get shut out.
With the law, the Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, is improving the electronic database and making it more accessible (public modem access and CD). To his credit he is underwriting the cost with public money, recognising the social need for the law to be accessible. (We will leave aside, for now, the inefficiency in the way his department is going about this task in not enlisting work already done by the private sector).
The important thing is that in the electronic age the on-cost of subsequent copies is going to get cheaper and cheaper _ just a phone call via modem to a database or just a $10 CD, unlike fat glossy paper copies of publications where the last copy of the press does not cost much less than the first.
Rupert Murdoch is entitled to charge whatever he likes for the Sun, however, government agencies that gather information with public money have an obligation to be a little more public-spirited. How they separate the socially-deserving from the commercially driven is another matter.
Perhaps the Lavarch approach is to be preferred _ ultimately the freer information is the more the community benefits, even if someone takes a commercial cut on the way through.