NBN: Where do we go from here?

Renai LeMay
Monday, 23 August 2010 13:00

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

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The following post is by Sean Kaye, a senior Australian IT executive. It first appeared on his personal blog, Sean on IT, and is re-published here with his permission. Kaye also blogs at Startups Down Under.

opinion A couple of great quotes can be used to sum up the recent Australian Federal Election. The first one is a classic that Julia Gillard pulled out in her post-election speech last night from Bill Clinton: “The people have spoken, but its going to take a little while to determine what they said.”

But the second quote I like and the basis for this article in relation to the NBN is from that great American thinker, Axl Rose who poetically sang: “Where do we go now?” in the Guns’n'Roses hit, Sweet Child O’ Mine.

Scholars are going to dissect this election result and the campaign leading up to it in great detail for many years to come and good luck to them — they’ll find whatever answers they want to find and call it fact. The truth is, this kind of election result is like a “glitch in the Matrix”. Labor lost support from all but its most ardent constituents: the non-union Left went to the Greens and the swinging centre/right moved to the Liberals. The swing was big enough to bring down the Labor Government, but because of preferences and some oddities in redistribution, who knows what’s going to happen. Again though, let’s leave that behind.

My attention is focused on trying to glean some understanding of what “the people” said about the NBN and how the parliament (both upper and lower house members of all stripes) should now act on this matter if we proceed with a minority government of some description for any length of time. Originally, in my piece about National Broadband policy, I put forward a proposition that we should simply hold off on the government’s massive expenditure until the country could better afford it. I questioned the government’s capability of successfully rolling out this plan, but go back and read it again, I’ve never once questioned whether or not we needed a national broadband strategy – I think we do. I just believe it needs to address the problem affordably for everyone.

Before I start my analysis, let me say that by no means do I think we should take the popular vote and mash it together as some form of issue by issue referendum, but for the sake of this piece, I’m taking some liberties with the mood of the voters to infer a way forward. Effectively, I’m asking for a bit of licence to find some sensible common ground, which is going to be necessary in this minority government situation if we are to have effective government.

Now that the matter has been put to the polls, here’s what I think the outcome should be. First of all, the internet filter is dead — neither the Greens nor the Coalition supported that nor did any of the minor parties, so we’re talking about 65 percent of the population. First up, bury that sucker in the deadpool and let’s never hear from it again — it was ill-conceived, bad policy.

I do think that the majority of Australians want a strong National Broadband Network. I think we can infer that the majority of Australians want this network to close the gap between rural and urban Australians in terms of technology availability. That said, I don’t think the majority of people want the Labor Party’s NBN either.