[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

A parliamentary inquiry into the NBN has invited submissions by 28 
February: <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/ic/NBN/>.

What worries me is that NBN Co. is assuming: "build it and they
will come". The government is spending billions of dollars building a 
system, in the hope that it will help with services, health, education, 
environment, economic growth, employment, business efficiency, research 
and development.

In my view the provision of the NBN is not sufficient to ensure 
broadband will benefit the community and may well cause harm. The NBN 
will allow the move of regional services jobs in government, finance, 
education and health to Australian cities and many of these Australian 
jobs overseas. The NBN may harm the environment by increasing greenhouse 
gas emissions from the energy it uses, by polluting groundwater from the 
equipment it makes obsolete and from discarded backup batteries.

I suggest submissions from ACS, ISOC-AU and similar bodies, proposing 
government programs and investment to ensure the NBN provides benefits. 
This could be along the lines of "Vision for a Networked Nation" which 
Roger Clarke wrote for ACS (with my assistance). This was presented to 
several parliamentary inquiries in the mid 1990s: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/nt/vision.html>.

Australian governments drew on the rhetoric and the specific proposals 
of this and similar submissions from the ICT community in formulating 
programs (such as "Networking the Nation") to help the community and 
industry use what became known as the Internet.

Examples of existing relatively low cost federal/state programs which 
could be boosted to make the NBN more effective for education are EdNa 
and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. These teach teachers how 
to create and use online educational resources. A modest few hundred 
million dollars invested in e-learning could result in billions of 
dollars in education exports and prevent the loss of Australia's current 
education industry to overseas imports.

More on this at:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/parliamentary-inquiry-into-role-and.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra