Communications ministers: absence makes the heart grow fonder?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 02 March 2009 10:46

IT Policy - Regulation

Time heals all wounds, they say. It certainly does wonders for the reputations of Australian federal communications ministers.

Popular broadband site Whirlpool runs an annual survey of its readers.

Among the questions in the latest survey - conducted between 31 December 2008 and 1 February 2009 - respondents were asked who they thought was Australia's least effective federal communications minister.

Whirlpool readers either think things are getting worse, or they are looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

The current minister, Stephen Conroy, got the thumbs down from almost one-third of respondents.

That's likely due to a combination of the (mis?)handling of the mooted national broadband network (NBN) and the ill-feeling about the government's proposal for compulsory Internet filtering at the ISP level.

Next comes his predecessor from the other side of politics, Helen Coonan. She took 16.9 percent of the vote, slightly more than half of Conroy's number.

Perhaps surprisingly, Richard Alston (who was minister from 1996 to 2003) was regarded as the least ineffective of the three.

While Conroy appears to have copped some stick over the filtering proposals, respondents seem to have overlooked Alston's 1999 role in the introduction of laws requiring ISPs to remove illegal or offensive material from their servers.

At the time, an Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesperson describe Alston as "ill-equipped to provide a leadership role in the era of the information economy since he has alienated himself from the very industry upon which that economy must be built".