James Bidgood (Dawson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I personally take a great deal of interest in history and records, having studied a degree in social science—documenting social history and development and the industrialisation of society. Well-kept records are invaluable for future years, as the previous member correctly said. It is good to note that there is some bipartisanship on the Archives Amendment Bill 2008. I hope it preserves for longer than 30 years. I do think it is important that, as technology changes over time, we have new means of recording information. Information can be recorded in any number of ways—for example, digitally on computers and mobile phones or transferred to SIM keys.

This updated definition of archives is all-encompassing and that is valuable. We supposedly now have a paperless society. As we know, some laugh when we say that. But the fact is a lot of stuff is recorded digitally. Sometimes in our 24-hour news cycle, particularly for the national government the time at which a telephone call is made and recorded digitally could be very important, literally, from one hour to the next, especially in times of global crisis, whether it be financial, war or international relations. Such recording is very important for the national archive. The extent of this goes beyond the traditional methods such as papers, books and various other audio recordings. It is essential that we treasure our archives because in the long run future generations can learn from how decisions were made and why certain actions were taken. The history that we have can teach future generations where things might be done better or how to develop more efficient systems.

Who knows in 30 years time what other technologies may be available? I left school in 1976, and new technology then was a pocket calculator. The biggest debate at that time was whether you could take a calculator into a maths exam. Kids today just laugh at that because they learn to type before they learn to write. My own children are a case in point. They could type before they could write, simply because they were surrounded by computers at home. So it is very, very important that we have a new definition of what archives are.

This goes a long way to ensuring the recording of all sorts of events, whether they be of a political nature, a climatic nature or whatever. We have satellite technology as well. Satellite technology can be used for a vast range of things, whether it is mapping our continent, looking at the contours of the land, looking at the heat coming out of our land or looking at where we choose to drill, mine or fish. All these things are recorded digitally and via satellite. So new technology brings about new definitions of what archives are. The way that that information is held and redisplayed is very important.

I personally have a passion for history. The way I learned history was through collecting coins and stamps, associating certain periods of kings and queens and rises and falls and new inventions with the year of a coin or looking at stamps highlighting certain themes. That is a very simplistic way of saying that different modes of archive recall certain amounts of information. Things like this are touchstones. They are symbolic. They open up a wealth of knowledge.

Our Indigenous people have a continuous culture of over 60,000 years. That culture, we have to remind ourselves, is a longer continuous culture than the Chinese culture. It is longer than the cultures of Rome, Greece and Egypt. Sometimes we forget that. How did they record their history? How did they pass on their traditions? How did they form their archives? We are currently discovering, all across our land, various cave paintings and drawings which were done. That is a symbolic form of history brought back to the memory. That is how the elders and the tribespeople explained to their children the stories of their elders.

Symbolism and the mode and the character of the things we hold and describe as archives take on many different meanings over tens of thousands of years. I think it is very important that we take that on board. I am very passionate about the print trade, having spent 20 years in it—I started as an apprentice in 1976. In our current society, even though the print trade has been eclipsed by the internet—another form of recording history and archive data—current contemporary history is really recorded in the newspapers of the day. That technology is still present with us and I am sure it will be around for quite a while, but it has been eclipsed by the internet, where we have literally a global library which we can access. Within government there are private internet library sites which are not open to the general public. They change over time and they need to be preserved.

Any good business operator, whether it is in the commercial world or in the government world, always has a good backup system. Mr Deputy Speaker Washer, I know that you and I come from similar backgrounds of running medical practices and that you know, from a litigation point of view, that it is absolutely vital that we have backup systems because backup systems of medical records—another form of archive—are very important. You do not just have one backup tape; you have many. Every day you have tapes backing up because your system might inadvertently crash without you knowing at a certain point and you might lose certain data. It is very important to have a backup system.

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