Kate Evans from Standards Australia, said a Standards Australia representative will be attending the BRM in Geneva and that it will await the agreed resolutions from JTC1 after the BRM has concluded.

However, Evans made no mention that another delegate, Rick Jelliffe, will be the senior Australian participant in the ISO ballot.

The only reason Computerworld has obtained for the backflip is the original two employees are unable to attend the BRM.

Director of government affairs at IBM Australia, Kaaren Koomen, who manages a technical person in the OOXML working group, said there were obvious discussions within the committee about who should represent Australia in Geneva and it was satisfied with the two Standards Australia people.

"We were quite surprised there was a change in the delegation without consultation with the committee and when we were advised by Standards Australia of the change there was consternation," Koomen said.

Koomen said the working group was not surprised at the ensuing discussion and there are a number of parties that are not comfortable with the change, including IBM.

"In terms of the BRM we would be relieved if there was another representative on the Australian delegation that felt confident so they could present other views that were more balanced," she said.

Director of Sydney-based open source advisory firm Waugh Partners Jeff Waugh said with concerns of bias and corruption tainting other working groups, the local standards group wants to ensure Standards Australia is not seen to have similar problems.

Waugh, who is also on Standards Australia's OOXML working group, said with two objective participants previously, the group wants to see what NZ has done applied here.

"We would suggest Standards Australia go with a no vote, but it's difficult to see a consensus form around 'no' given the way the process has been run," Waugh said, adding Jelliffe's presence will "certainly have an impact".

"I don't what they are going to do, but with the position they are in the most likely option is to abstain."

Waugh believes Jelliffe has raised some good comments about the specification, but said it is disconcerting that his commentary of OOXML is along the lines of "yes, there are problems with it, but none are showstoppers so we should standardize it anyway".

"Nothing fazes him about the quality of the specification," Waugh said. "A restructure of the document would help and the ECMA has restructured it quite significantly, but we are still on this fast-track process and we don't have a huge amount of time to go through it before it could become a standard."

"Saying no means saying no to the fast-track process," Waugh said. "There is a view that more time is needed to go through the specification, and there is a view that by standardizing it now we are going to push back the option to further harmonize the OOXML and ODF standards."

Waugh said bringing more of the features of the two standards together will eliminate having two standards for many of the same things, and from a locally ISV point of view would simplify the work required by ISVs to support the document formats.

Another organization on the OOXML working group is Google.

A Google spokesperson told Computerworld the question of whether OOXML is ready for approval as an ISO/IEC standard "is of enormous importance, and we believe that Australia's interests would be much better represented in Geneva if our delegation represented both viewpoints".

"Rick is a highly respected expert in the field of XML-based standards," the spokesperson said. "It does, however, raise concerns that by his own admission he has been a paid consultant on OOXML for the very company proposing it as a standard."

Rick Jelliffe was unavailable for comment.