Australia’s a big place right? Nice and big, with enough room to spread out; stretch your legs a little. 

Can be a bit of an issue if you are in need of a toilet and you are in the middle of nowhere.  Or what if you want to have a barbie, cook up some snags and have a few tinnies?

A Federal Government competition has seen the development of some amazing, useful apps, like the app to find the nearest public barbecue Meat in A Park and Rate a Loo, which shows your closest public toilets. 

Another notable app includes, in typical Aussie slang  It's Buggered Mate that reports damaged public facilities directly to the relevant council.
These apps have already been unveiled in beta form, so you can have a look at them from both computers and mobile phones.

Geeks all over the country have been coding apps for the MashUp Australia competition, and two weekends ago the Government 2.0 Taskforce brought an army of 150 geeks together for a coding marathon called GovHack.

They formed teams to work on and demonstrate their applications, and at the end a panel decided that the best was LobbyClue, which combines data from the lobbyist register, contract notices, business names and other information to produce visual representations of relationships between government organisations and businesses.

GovHack organiser John Allsopp said he thought all of the government people in the room shivered.

Have you tried Meat in A Park, or Rate A Loo? What did you reckon mate?

- Take a gap year in Australia with the Australian Working Holiday Visa.

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