'State of the Regions' report bemoans state of broadband in Australia

Stuart Corner
Monday, 08 December 2008 10:40

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

“I cannot believe the ALGA is happy to spruik the broadband policies of the Rudd Labor Government, yet remains silent about the spurious cancelling of the OPEL project. A project which would have seen Commonwealth funding appropriately targeted at under served regions of Australia."

Releasing the report ALGA said: "National Economics stresses that wireless broadband services in Australia are still relatively expensive and the cost of these services could continue to constrain the development of businesses located in regional Australia as well as businesses delivering services via broadband," but made no comment on any gains that the Opel network might have produced.

The SOR report identifies "a troubling convergence of factors that will have an impact on regional economic development." It says that "Coming together, as they now appear to be doing, these factors in combination are likely to have a much greater impact on regional economic development than would otherwise have been the case."

High on the list is "The lack of progress in developing a National Broadband Network," along with "the impending costs of climate change and the further costs of greenhouse gas emissions abatement; the global financial crisis; the record highs in household debt; the likelihood that, in Australia, the knowledge economy has failed to spread outside of the existing knowledge-intensive regions.

Last year the report claimed to have identified $3.2 billion and 33,000 jobs lost to Australian businesses in 12 months due to inadequate broadband infrastructure and the possibility of an estimated $40 to $50 billion in savings from e-health/e-medicine and smart networks over 10 years.

It notes "There were also lost opportunities to reduce greenhouse emissions because of the failure to implement knowledge economy advances to health related transport and failure to introduce smart grids to reduce energy consumption."

Peter Hylands, one of the authors of the report, noted that knowledge intensive regions are much less vulnerable to the financial impact of emissions trading. "For each employee that works in resource based regions the cost with carbon at $50 per tonne will be an addition $7300 per year."

The report concludes gloomily, "There is no reason to assume any improvement in these numbers for 2008... What continues to be extremely frustrating is that demand for improved telecommunications is manifest, while the underlying outcome of many years of misplaced telecommunications policy has led to the stalling of investment in high speed broadband telecommunications infrastructure.

"Today, the weakness of the Australian dollar combined with the impact of the global financial crisis will bring upward pressure on the costs of building the national broadband network.

Hylands said "I have been writing these reports for years now and nothing really changes but he said that the current economic climate made the issue much harder to deal with. It is now been shifted into an economic space where it will be much harder to deal with. It is much harder to borrow money."