Dave Bath

The Gershon Report recently published through finance.gov.au outlines many (but not all) improvements to information handling by government, such as the advantages of properly managed data centres. These have much wider application than merely to government agencies. It may be useful to provide guidelines to data centre operators and potential customers within Australia about various legal issues (e.g. ownership and confidentiality of information, guarantees of non-transference of that information outside Oz, etc) so that adoption of centralized data services by businesses (including SMEs) can proceed more quickly. At the same time, electronic document management, especially for contracts, is difficult when use of digital certificates and PKI by the community is very immature, especially when compared with Singapore which allows all or nearly all legal documents (as properly secured PDF files and forms) to exist only in electronic form, reducing the environmental costs of paper-based documents. Combining these two themes, it may be reasonable for the government to consider providing a free service to all individuals to manage keys and certificates, while providing central and secure storage (accessible only by the individual and appropriate agencies) of archival versions of all important "paperwork" between the government and the citizen. With a nominal charge to cover costs, a similar services to Australian businesses could both enhance the digital economy while reducing the environmental footprint of general business activity.