Earlier this week Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed that Premiers and Chief Ministers are being asked to share their state and territory driver’s licence data for a national facial recognition database. Today the Premiers and Chief Ministers agreed to do so. It’s a hard proposal to argue against. Law…

The Australian government just announced its intention to begin drug testing trials of certain welfare recipients, as part of its 2017 federal budget. Whether you agree with the policy or not, how welfare recipients will be identified for drug testing has implications for us all. The 2017 Australian federal government…

Reading the final report of the Australian Productivity Commission on Data Availability and Use Today the Australian government released the Productivity Commission’s final report on Data Availability and Use, an ambitious plan for data reform in Australia. An overview and full text of the report (the full text is over 650 pages) are available here. The Productivity Commission is the Australian Government’s independent advisory…

News this week that Unroll.me — a popular tool for organising subscription emails — sold their users’ anonymised email data to Uber has sparked a mass exodus of Unroll.me users. I’m an Unroll.me user, and I’ve been following the public reaction to their data commercialisation model with interest. …

I was sixteen when I decided I was bad at maths. I remember it vividly. My year 11 maths teacher Mr. Joyce had asked me to leave the classroom while he handed out the results for the end of year exam in applicable mathematics. …

(I will come back and make this a snazzier title) Yesterday the Australian Productivity Commission published its draft report, Data availability and use, for public comment. The full report is 650 pages long, with 27 draft recommendations. That’s going to take a while for anyone to absorb. …

In ten days time I’m saying goodbye to London and moving back to Australia. My visa expires in early September, and the time feels right to go home. We’ve lived away from Australia for a few years now, and back in Australia friends and family are doing those things people…

Last week the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) celebrated 12 months of #OpenDefra: their commitment to releasing 8,000 datasets as open data in one year, and kickstarting a transition across the department to an open culture. I experienced first hand the changes inside Defra initiated by…