[LINK] Coonan vs Conroy

Stilgherrian stil at stilgherrian.com
Wed Oct 3 18:10:56 AEST 2007


Thanks all for the suggestions and comments for this Friday's breakfast with
the ICT minister and her ALP counterpart. I've compiled the list at
http://stilgherrian.com/politics/coonan_vs_conroy_1/ but also repeated it
below 'cos I know how stuck in their text-based email programs some people
are... ;)

Happy to get more questions/comments before I go...

Stil



As mentioned last week, Friday morning I¹m having breakfast with the ICT
minister Senator Helen Coonan and her ALP counterpart Senator Stephen Conroy
‹ along with some many members of the ACS.

That¹s Senator Coonan on the right.

While the discussion will be chaired by some bloke from Channel 7, I¹m
assuming there¹ll be a chance for questions. When I asked on Link last week,
here¹s what popped up. What would you add?

[In no particular order, numbered for reference.]

   1. ICT as a critical ³enabling² element in our response to climate
change, which will require lots of distributed access to lots of information
and the tools to evaluate it.

   2. Protecting children online.

   3. Increased broadband capacity at affordable prices.

   4. What happened to the Information Economy? Why are all the information
jobs going off shore to India?

   5. What is going to happen to the CDMA network?

   6. Why does the government continue to behave like they own Telstra?

   7. Programming for digital TV.

   8. What would each do in government to facilitate remote/teleworking?

   9. Reducing Australia¹s reliance on monopoly software ‹ particularly in
government; promotion of the use of open standards; and the development of a
national software industry based on open standards and open source.

  10. ICT security ‹ do we want to develop critical ICT infrastructure with
(how can I say this diplomatically?) levels of security commonly associated
with user platforms?

  11. An enforced split of Telstra¹s retail and infrastructure divisions

I think I¹d pull back to a Big Picture question about teh Internet. In 1995,
Australia was 3rd on the planet in terms of Internet bandwidth and computer
power per population, now we¹re not even in the Top 10. What are your
thoughts on that? Is it important? If so, how should it be addressed? If
not, why not?

What are your thoughts?


-- 
Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
mobile +61 407 623 600
fax +61 2 9516 5630
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