[LINK] NBN, education and health

[Robin Whittle]

There are several tragic ironies regarding education and the NBN.

One of the big reasons the government gives for spending tens of
billions of dollars on the NBN is to improve education for people in
general, especially outside the major population centres.

Yet the plan was devised by people who were uneducated in IT and
infrastructure planning matters - the prime minister and the minister
for (censored) communications.

Now a bunch of bright, hard working, people at NBNCo now have the job of
achieving the outcome, according to the timetable, and within the $43B
cost - all of which were decided largely or entirely by the two
insufficiently qualified people who devised the project.

NBNCo try to get quotes from a bunch of companies on the most difficult
aspect of the project, running fibre along streets and into individual
homes - and connecting the requisite equipment.  I am not sure how they
can they specify the difficulties of doing this.  So how could there be
a contract, unless the tenderers are supposed to take enormous risk?

The quotes come back - the work of people who are presumably very well
educated in these matters - and they are all too high for the spec,
timetable and costs which have already been determined.

Part of the problem is that these potential installation contracting
companies don't have - and won't be able to get - sufficient numbers of
suitably educated people to do the work.

If the NBN existed today, it wouldn't help much in providing the sort of
education required for doing a number of useful things, such as laying
cable, installing and testing equipment etc.

It is arguably a result of insufficient education that:

  1 - The whole NBN proposal was conceived, with its goals and costs
      already decided - never mind alternative approaches to using
      the money for health and education - and then taken seriously
      within the government.

  2 - That anyone outside government took it seriously.  Even quite
      well planned IT projects are highly prone to going over-time and
      over budget and/or being obsolete or in some other way
      inappropriate by the time they are completed.  Yet this is a
      project far bigger than any other IT project, with far less in
      the way of suitably informed planning.

  3 - That there is not a greater pool of people with general skills
      of a suitable kind who could be brought up to speed in something
      like cable-laying and telco installation.


I think some of the NBN money would be better spent on boosting pay
rates of teachers - from kindergarten teachers to university lecturers -
and ensuring that the best people for these jobs want to do this work
and are well supported with training, professional development and good
facilities.  The whole public education system needs to be a matter of
national pride - and the teachers should be the sort of people who are
widely respected.  Then we won't have so much of this pernicious
splitting of student populations into private schools, leaving the
public schools to handle only those whose parent's don't have higher
standards and the money to send them elsewhere.  I understand this is
the typical situation in the USA.

I think very little of what is important in education - particularly
kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and most of TAFE - can be
conducted through electronic channels and/or be achieved without really
good teachers.

Likewise, I think the contribution the NBN will make to health is
minimal compared to whatever benefits are already achievable with a mix
of DSL and 3G wireless.  These already exist where the great majority of
Australians live.  Maybe putting in low-cost high-speed broadband will
encourage nurses and doctors to live outside major cities, and so
improve health outcomes in this manner.  Still, I think the money would
be better spent directly on health outside the major population centres
- facilities, salaries, training and professional development and
whatever is needed to encourage sufficient numbers or doctors and nurses
to live and work outside the big cities.

If there was better education and healthcare outside the major cities,
more people would choose to live there and there would be a stronger
demand for broadband communications - which existing providers would be
able to meet via DSL, fibre or 3G / WiMax radio links.

So directly funding health and education would arguably improve
broadband in the bush, without the government needing to support any
such IT project, or worry about exactly which technologies would be
used.  Also, without the need to suddenly create or import a massive
workforce of cable layers and the like for a once-off project.

That said, no matter what governments and corporations do, living far
from major population centres will never provide lots of the benefits of
living near them.  People make a choice about where to live, and I don't
think it is the role of most taxpayers to spend excessive sums of money
to bring every benefit to them, no matter where they live.

Even with the best health and education outcomes for people living
outside major cities, the major cities will continue to grow because
many things are less expensive (good food, short commute distances to
jobs) and because a greater variety of activities, jobs etc. are
available.  To the extent these attractions exist, we see the price of
real-estate in cities going up - until these costs roughly balance out
the benefits according to how many people weigh them up.

 - Robin