The lights burned most of the night in Barton and West Deakin.
Canberra’s third biggest industry was at work. Ralph Willis had just delivered the Budget and industry groups (at least the active ones) had to have all the pertinent bits circulated through their industry first thing next morning.
The executive directors and their minions thumbed through the voluminous Budget papers members getting an overview and extracting the detail of what might affect their industry.
It is a hard slog. It is easy to miss something.
At 1pm that day about 400 journalists attended a lock up in Parliament House. For six and a half hours before Mr Willis gets to his feet, they, too, slogged through the papers. The journalists were given _ wait for it _ 1.2 tonnes of paper. Some journalists are the comentators, the overview writers and those who concentrate on the new big-ticket items. Others are specialist writers: science, education, sport, health, arts, defence, law and so on. The things they write about (arguably the more important elements to the Budget which appear well back in the newspaper) are usually scattered in bits all over the Budget papers.
Unbeknown to most journalists and lobby groups there were three computer specialists from the Canberra firm SoftLaw Corporation in the lock-up. They had been there since first thing on Monday morning.
These three were busily compiling the main Budget papers in electronic form using SoftLaw’s Windows-based STATUTE E-Publish software.
They reduced the main Budget papers and the software to two disks. (Total cost $35.) They take about 10 minutes to load on to a standard 386 or less on a 486 computer.
The benefits are obvious:
1. You can search the text for words you want. “”pharmacuetical”, “”inflation”, “”agriculture” and so on. This is far superior to the paper index.
2. You can cut a paste relevant bits (including graphs) into whatever computer software you are running without rekeying.
3. You do not have to lug around the paper version. A complete set of budget papers weighs three kilograms; the disks weigh 2 per cent of that.
4. Many trees are saved.
The E-Publish software is much more sophisticated than a text-only dump of the Budget. It comes in Windows so you drive it intuitively with point and click. You can start with the contents and open windows at various starting points in the text. These can be cascaded or tiled. And you can search for text in each window.
The program memorises your windows and can back track. You can place bookmarks wherever you want and click back to them, like an electronic yellow slips.
Also when the text carries a note or a reference to a chart you can click on the note number or the underlined “”see Chart X” and the chart or note appears immediately in a new sub-window.
The SoftLaw people finished their work at 4am on Tuesday so the disks could be copied and sent out to Australian Government Publishing Service Bookstores throughout Australia in time for their special 7.30pm openings that night. (Alas the three programmers, Belinda Burgess, David Mead and Simon Tilley, were forced to stay locked up at Parliament House until 7.30pm.)
Nic van den Berg, the manager of electronic services at AGPS, said Working Nation was also available on disk and others would follow.
SoftLaw is already doing major statute law, such as the nightmare new Industrial Relations Act, on disk. With its software you can move around the statute more easily that on paper. All words defined in the statute appear in green or underlines in the text and you can click on them and the definition from the definition section appears in a separate window.
SoftLaw’s Michael Johns says amendments and updates are far easier electronically. You just replace the whole disk and send the old ones back. Paper amendments result in bits stuck in documents all over the place.
SoftLaw is based in Canberra (Phone 2421982). It works from the Canberra Business Centre in the old Downer Primary School and has 17 employees. The Canberra Business Centre is an incubation centre for small business.
There are some drawbacks. Not all the Budget papers were included this year and the graphs were in object form only. You could not get the data in raw tabular form to create your own graphics.
Mr van den Berg said, however, that this year’s Budget was very much a pilot. There would be a review and he hoped to include more material next year.