Federal Budget: Hopefully Still the “Lucky Country”

David Heath
Tuesday, 13 May 2008 19:56

IT Policy - Regulation

Australia is very much a “first world” country.  As such, we must focus on being a knowledge and skills country; there’s only so much dirt we can dig up and sell to China before we disappear down our own mine-shaft.

In order to become the flexible, knowledge-based economy we need to be, we absolutely have to have a world-class internet.  12 Mb/sec in 4 years doesn’t cut it.  Just look at Asian developing countries such as Singapore, Korea etc they have that already.  Even in the US, that soon-to-be developing economy, where the state of Utah has the Utopia project which will deliver 100Mb/sec to every household.

The national broadband project has been hanging around for some time.  The Howard Government couldn’t convince Telstra to do it and I can’t see that the Rudd Government will be any different.  Until government recognises that internet infrastructure is NO DIFFERENT to highway infrastructure and should be treated just the same we will remain in an internet backwater. 

The solution is simple; the infrastructure should be public property, available to all.  Telstra, G9, T4 and every other customer-facing telco can package up services in any way they see fit and sell them for profit whilst paying for the access.

Can I spell it out any more clearly?  Partition Telstra!

Anyway, now we turn our attention to the “Cyber-safety Plan.”  This is a joke, right? 

There are a small number of places where such ‘tools’ could be installed:

• At the national gateways – no, legitimate uses will complain that traffic is blocked

• At the ISPs – no, they have far better things to do with their money and time (like make a profit!)

• At the desktop – unfortunately a 16-year-old showed how easy it was to bypass this software on his parents’ PC.  As soon as it is widely available, the teen-only chat sites will be explaining (with software and scripts) how to bypass the filters.

Another $127M out the window.