Conroy's Digital Strategy will face many hurdles

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 31 May 2011 17:21

Opinion and Analysis

The National Digital Economy Strategy released today is a good start, but it faces many hurdles, in addition to the Federal Opposition's long running battle against the NBN.

At this point in time the Federal Opposition has yet to attack the Government's National Digital Economy Strategy (NDES). It would do well to restrain itself. NDES stacks up pretty well against the Coalition's own abysmal track record on similar initiatives.

The Coalition came out with its National Broadband Strategy in 2004, but a further year passed until it released an action plan that was supposed to set out steps needed to achieve the goals of the strategy. It contained a number of key performance indicators, but there were no specifics against any of these.

The National Broadband Strategy sank without trace and three years later the Coalition came out with the National Broadband Blueprint, without making any reference whatsoever to its predecessor. The Coalition was, however, careful to avoid making the same mistake twice: the Blueprint emerged in December 2006 as a 100 page glossy publication that was long on elaboration of the status quo and extremely short on vision, specific goals and identifiable actions statements.

In contrast NDES does contain some clear goals, eight in fact, covering
- online participation by Australian households;
- online engagement by Australian businesses and not-for-profit organisations;
- smart management of our environment and infrastructure;
- improved health and aged care;
- expanded online education;
- increased teleworking;
- improved online government service delivery and engagement;
- greater digital engagement in regional Australia.

And these are quite specific. For example, in eHealth the goal is that, by 2020 "90 percent of high priority consumers such as older Australians, mothers and babies and those with a chronic disease, or their carers, can access individual electronic health records'¦[and] by July 2015, 495,000 telehealth consultations will have been delivered providing remote access to specialists for patients in rural, remote and outer metropolitan areas, and by 2020, 25 percent of all specialists will be participating in delivering telehealth consultations to remote patients."

Achievement of the specific goals will, the strategy says, see Australia achieve the overarching goal of NDES: to be a leading global digital economy. But there is another measure by which this will be judged:

"Australia will have successfully made the transition to a leading digital economy when the efficient use of digital technologies has become so interwoven with citizens' business, professional and personal lives, that they move seamlessly between the digital and physical world as appropriate."

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