James Riley
Thursday, 24 June 2010 02:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 5
The generational change that saw Kevin Rudd swept to power in 2007 brought with it great expectations from a local technology sector which had struggled for a decade to convince John Howard that the industry deserved a bigger priority profile in national affairs.
Faster broadband became an election issue, albeit on the smaller scale of Labor’s original smaller $4.7 billion fibre network plans. Rudd was doing photo-ops with notebook computers in schools and talking freely of a revolution in the classroom.
He spoke fluently about the internet in terms of its strategic national importance – to education and health, to business, to exports, to wealth creation – in a way that John Howard never did.
And Rudd seemed to underline his internet-savvy message by running a smart Kevin07-based online campaign that was a central component of his election strategy, rather than simply an adjunct to a more traditional 1.0 style.
Through his former career as a politico/bureaucrat as Wayne Goss' chief of staff, Rudd was both familiar and enthused about the role of new technologies – especially online – for delivering better citizen services at lower cost. (To be fair to John Howard, he was across this stuff in a big way, but didn't particularly need or want to know detail, instead charging departmental secretary Peter Shergold to create world class public sector reforms that still shape Government’s strategic use of IT today.)
Once Kevin Rudd was elected, Australia suddenly had a Prime Minister who was both personally engaged with technology issues, and who addressed those issues directly. For the local industry, that alone was invigorating.
But great expectations carry with them their own set of problems, and certainly Kevin Rudd knows this better than he would like in the post-Copenhagen world. Despite Rudd Labor having made great progress in most tech-related areas, there remain frustrations.
Let's list them. The ambitious and laudable schools computer program has been delivered slower than anticipated, and (incredibly), initially to schools lacking networking infrastructure or skills, and no budget to acquire then – to say nothing of internet speeds at schools.
