The Howard government and its (lack of) vision for broadband in Australia

I have finally started to ‘transition’ towards retirement and will probably spend a little more time at Deans Marsh where we have a small house on a few acres.  The process of transition is to spend less time traveling to and from the office and to spend more time working from home other than those times when it’s absolutely necessary to meet face to face.

This presents no problem from my primary residence at Argyle Road since I have a plethora of technology that allows me to connect to the outside world at a reasonable (but not world class) speed. The other part of this transition is that I plan to spend a little more time relaxing at Deans Marsh for a few long weekends.  This is where the need for decent bandwidth comes in since I will need to have good communication with the systems at home and in the office.

The best that the Government, Telstra, Optus and/or Singapore Telecommunications can do at the moment is to provide me with roughly 40 KBits per second along a dial up connection.  For those that have never used anything else then I suppose it provides some sort of access to the web, but trying to do anything sensible is just about impossible. I decided to see whether the local exchange was able to provide me with an ADSL connection.  Having entered my telephone details into the Telstra web site after a lengthy delay it told me that ADSL is not available in Deans Marsh.  Nevertheless it had a link which purported to take me to another web page where I could ‘register’ my interest.  Well for #$%^ sake do I have to register my interest for the Government, Telstra and/or Optus to determine whether or not they should be providing the inhabitants of Deans Marsh with broadband?  Every citizen of this country should be able to access fast broadband – no ifs or buts.

This Government’s woeful performance in fostering the Information & Communications Technology industry is the primary cause of the parlous state of broadband in this country. The liberal government and its ministers have no vision for the industry and have only just dreamt up some plans because an election is in the offing.  What on earth was Senator Alston thinking about when he commented that there was no need for fast broadband – after all it will only be used to “play games and download pornography”.  Hadn’t he ever thought about remote learning, medical imaging and a host of other applications that benefit from ubiquitous fast broadband?

Unfortunately Senator Coonan, the current minister, is even worse.  The Howard government, of which she is a member, has for the past decade claimed to be the champion of Australia’s National Security.  So they have now developed a plan for the rollout of broadband across the country but what the $%^&* is Senator Coonan doing in placing the rollout in the hands of the Singapore Government?  It’s beyond belief.  Control of our country’s communications infrastructure has to be one of the things that we as a nation needs to control.  So why at the same time she is intent on destroying Telstra.  Have a look at an opinion piece in The Age by Jason Koutsoukis on Saturday 7^th October.  It’s called Coonan the Barbarian and expresses my own views better than I can.

Having touched on the issue of National Security it is worth reading Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews’ book entitled ‘National Insecurity, The Howard Government’s betrayal of Australia’.  It argues that the Howard government makes much about governing ‘in the national interest’ but the authors demonstrate that the government “vigorously promotes itself as the guardian of national security but whose actions, choices and commitments in critical policy domains effectively undermine that security and trample the national interest”.  The authors contend that there are five main issues which are critical to the country’s national security and they are:

• Energy
• Rural Industries
• Culture
• Defence, and
• Blood

I am surprised that they don’t include communications infrastructure at the top of their list.  It’s well worth reading and you can find a preview here. 

So I’ve strayed a bit from broadband access in Deans Marsh but it’s not as if Deans Marsh is some place miles from anywhere, populated by computer illiterates.  It’s just behind Lorne in the foothills of the Otways where there is a thriving community.  Since Telstra can’t tell us when Deans Marsh will have broadband access maybe Helen Coonan could give us some indication of when we can expect the representatives of the Signapore Government visiting us in Deans Marsh and connecting us to the rest of the world.