The NGDI of Australia - Achievements and Challenges from a Federal Perspective
The Importance of Co-ordination of Activities
The division of responsibilities between the three levels of government in Australia - federal, state and local - makes it important to co-ordinate geographic information activities to avoid duplication and to facilitate sharing of data across the jurisdictions. The peak co-ordinating council for geographic information in Australia is ANZLIC, which has representatives from all levels of government. Industry is also represented through a standing committee on industry development.
| Federal Government |
State Government |
Local Government |
| Taxation |
Law Enforcement |
Town Planning |
| Defence |
Education |
Local Roads |
| Trade and Foreign Affairs including International Treaties |
Transport |
Rates |
| Social Security |
Health Services |
Local Environment |
| Astronomical Observations and Navigation |
Land Management |
Essential local infrastructure |
| Statistics |
Agriculture |
|
Table 1: A broad overview of the responsibilities of the various levels of government in Australia
Broadly speaking the responsibilities between the different levels of government are given in Table 1.
The level of autonomy of state and territory governments in Australia can sometimes cause difficulties at arriving at consistent national approaches to issues, however this autonomy has resulted in effective land management infrastructures in each jurisdiction. It is in effect a distributed as opposed to a centralised model. Also the relatively small number of state level governments (six states and two territory governments) makes co-ordination achievable in Australia. This contrasts with the United States of America where the number of states makes meeting and agreeing on issues far more difficult.
The model for the ASDI is in essence a combination of the jurisdictional level spatial data infrastructures whereby the ASDI provides the “glue” to enable these jurisdictional geo-spatial data infrastructures to inter-operate. The national challenge is to ensure standards are developed and applied at both the technical and policy levels so that national datasets can be derived from jurisdictional data. There will, however, always remain reasons for federal agencies to produce nationally consistent datasets where it is not feasible to simply “sew together” data available from states and territories.
The federal government co-ordinates its geographic information activities through the Commonwealth Spatial Data Committee1 (CSDC). This committee consists of the major federal government spatial data users and producers and the chairman of CSDC represents the federal government on ANZLIC.