Stuart Corner
Monday, 28 January 2008 13:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
When Australia's last Labor Government came to power, in 1993, its prime minister, Paul Keating, had a sense of the important role broadband communications infrastructure would play in the nation's future and moved quickly to fulfil a pre-election promise to examine issues and options.
He set up the Fibre Optic Systems Expert Group to "examine preconditions for the technical, economic and commercial viability of widespread broadband optical fibre", and gave it $1 million to do its job. That group morphed into the Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG) which to the dismay of many issued a draft report recommending that Australia not worry about broadband infrastructure but focus entirely on content issues. In the face of strident opposition its final report came closer to the original vision, but was heavily focussed on services and usage rather than underlying infrastructure. And the original vision? The word was that it had been white-anted by Telstra, or Telecom as it then was.
By this time the Howard Government was in power driven by an ideology that said Government intervention in the economic life of the nation was best kept to a minimum. Telecommunications infrastructure, because it did not monopolise large chunks of real estate, was not really seen as infrastructure at all. Thus followed more than a decade of study groups, recommendations and anodyne reports masquerading as national strategies while for most of its 13 years the Howard Government tried to pretend that broadband was not an infrastructure issue of national importance.
With broadband becoming a high profile item on the national agendas of most major nations this position ceased to be tenable and the Government embarked on a series of piecemeal and ill-conceived initiatives that culminated in the contentious awarding to Opel of $1 billion of taxpayers' money for a regional broadband network.
The wheel has now come full circle, the ALP is back in power and is progressing with its promised FTTN rollout, but
this policy , dreamed up in opposition, seems to have been cobbled together with minimal resources. As the former communications minister, Helen Coonan, never ceased to remind anybody, there was less than a page of new 'policy' its 21 page broadband policy statement of March 2007.
