The Sydney Morning Herald has several articles today about the failure of Federal Government committees over the past few years -

A Herald investigation has found that the Federal Government has not replied on time to a single public inquiry out of the 62 it has ordered in the House of Representatives since December 1998. It has given no reply at all to almost half of them.

This is worrying for many reasons. Those who can least afford to lobby government, those advocating for social change, have spent a great deal of time and money preparing submissions for committees. ALIA has spent a lot of their efforts on contributing to inquries and submissions. And last year when I wrote a paper for the ALIA conference, one of the most relevant and detailed references I used was the Environment Communications Information Technology and
the Arts References Committee’s Libraries in the online environment report [PDF]. Quite depressing to think that some of the important recommendations made in that report may never be realised.