Australia / 2013 66% open

1:250 000 scale Topographic vector data is also downloadable in full https://www.ga.gov.au/products/servlet/controller?event=FILE_SELECTION&catno=63999 One of first government organisations to adopt open licencing specifically Creative Commons. http://www.ga.gov.au/copyright.html Also provides WMS API http://www.ga.gov.au/mapconnect/wms.jsp

All data, paid and publicly accessible online, from statistical organisation is Creative Commons licenced.

Data only became openly licenced on the 1st of February 2012 because it was the first disclosure date of political donations after Creative Commons Attribution became the default licence of PSI for the Commonwealth of Australia. This led to statement informing users that all other data from the electoral commission being licenced openly: http://www.aec.gov.au/footer/copyright.htm Otherwise, machine readable data (CSV overviews and XML for finest granularity) is provided minute-by-minute on election dates for media organisations to use in their reporting and now this access is provided to citizens.

The postal dataset referenced is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1270.0.55.003July%202011?OpenDocument - actual data in zip file at http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/subscriber.nsf/log?openagent&1270055003_poa_2011_aust_shape.zip&1270.0.55.003&Data%20Cubes&71B4572D909B934ECA2578D40012FE0D&0&July%202011&22.07.2011&Previous). This has the areas of postal areas (and shapefiles for their boundaries) from which, for example, centroids can be derived. This data is machine-readable and available in bulk and as with all ABS data is openly licensed (CC-By - see http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/Home/%A9+Copyright?opendocument#from-banner=GB). However, the ABS data is only updated on a 5-yearly basis so Note the Australian Postal Service do have a fully up-to-date database but it is not open. See e.g. https://auspost.com.au/forms/postcode-data-registration.html where you can download some data extracts from their PCODE database but under license terms that include the statement: "Australia Post grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive licence to download and use the extract file(s) and the data contained within for non-commercial use only. Non-commercial use means any use of the data by an individual or organisation for the validation of the locality name and assigned postcode for their own purposes. You are expressly forbidden to download, copy or use all or any of the extract file(s) and the data contained within for any of the following purposes: ... [and goes on to list a large number of exclusions]"

Unable to identify a published dataset of the Australian Government budget. The budget is only available in a series of PDF documents. The data is incorporated within the PDF documents.

You can download the results of searches as XML (and also in some cases as CSV) - see e.g. http://www.npi.gov.au/npidata/action/load/download-result. As such we are marking machine-readable as yes. However bulk is marked "no" as there is no simple way to get the entire database easily. Data is not openly licensed as copyright notice at http://www.npi.gov.au/%C2%A9-commonwealth-australia states: "You may download, store in cache, display, print and reproduce the material in unaltered form only (retaining this notice, or links to it where they appear) for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organisation." (Note also that the copyright link on many data pages is to http://www.npi.gov.au/about/copyright.html which 404s!).

Not openly licensed as license according to http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Content/Copyright#licensed) is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence Australia v3.0 (which is not open). Data is not machine-readable as data is either PDF or (poorly structured HTML) and is not bulk as you can only access on item at a time. Date available is date of new licensing.

There is a lookup available at http://abr.business.gov.au/Index.aspx, and basic details available to public for free under open licence http://www.business.gov.au/Legalnotices/Pages/Copyright.aspx Full details available through data brokers only. Claimed to be legal barriers to provide information on company shareholders/owners for free http://www.oaic.gov.au/news/consultations/issuespaper1_subs/asic_submission.html

Australia is somewhat limited in the presence of national transport as most public transport operates at the city or state level (An overview of the situation at the city level can be found via http://www.citygoround.org/agencies/au/?public=all which indicates that availability and open licencing varies substantially across states/transit authorities) - and much national transport is privately provided - for example buses via Greyhound Australia (see http://www.greyhound.com.au/). Looking at rail where there is an interstate system, similar to the UK, Australia has a nationally supported rail system in which the actual service is provided by private operators (but track is publicly owned and maintained). Similar to the UK, there are therefore good public interest grounds for the government to require provision of timetable data. Focusing on rail then there is no consolidated database of timetable information - instead you are directed off to each rail companies website where you must do your own lookup using a classic HTML interface. As such it is clear the data exists and is online but is not machine-readable, not in bulk and based on the notice on various websites not open (for example, Transport West Australia's train website has a classic fully restrictive copyright notice at http://www.transwa.wa.gov.au/Default.aspx?tabid=113)

Data is released fortnightly through Austender, and compilation dating back to 2011 is available on data.gov.au. The dataset at https://www.tenders.gov.au/?event=public.reports.listCNWeeklyExport is a dataset of contract notices; "The Contract Notice Export is an export file containing contract notice data for all Australian Government agencies who report procurement on AusTender published over a one week period." Although this is valuable data (and in line with that published by other excellent jurisdictions) it is not expenditure information in terms of the definition of this element ("Government spending at a detailed transactional level, that is at the level of month to month government expenditure including money spent on specific contracts or with specific vendors."). It does not detail individual payments to vendors when they are made, only the overall estimated value of the contract at the time of award. IMHO there should also be category for contract award information for which this dataset would be an excellent example. But it is not the expenditure information required by the census.