[LINK] NBN, education and health

[Richard Chirgwin]

Robin,

[snip]
> 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.
Of all the areas of government spending, the NBN is too frequently 
thought of as exclusive of other spending in some way or other - because 
we're spending X on the NBN, we can't spend Y on education / health / 
whatever. It may be just as true to say "because we have committed Z to 
the joint strike fighter, we are spending less on the NBN" - and it may 
be more accurate to describe the JSF as a waste, given that each country 
to withdraw from the project makes it more expensive to the remaining 
countries and less likely to proceed. Moreover, we have less control 
over the costs of such a project than we have over the NBN.

So - why single out the NBN as somehow exclusive of other government 
spending?

[snip to avoid reviving the old debate about relative merits of 
different technologies]
> 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.
Well, yes. But it's also reasonable to ask "why these particular cities? 
Why so few cities?" As a counter-example - America's population is very 
urbanised, but there's a large number of cities. A long time ago, I was 
told by Dennis Hayes (of the modems) that to reach half America's 
population meant visiting 50 cities (the number has probably changed 
since then). In Australia, more than half the population is in the 
Melbourne / Sydney / SE Queensland urbanisations.

Partly it's water - that Australia offers fewer attractive sites for 
large cities - but it must also be regarded as the outcome of policy 
decisions. Is it reversable? - Probably, but it would be difficult.

The idea that taxpayers should not fund "every benefit" to people 
regardless of their location, in my opinion, over-simplifies the debate. 
It seems to presume that the flow of benefits is unidirectional.

"People will make a choice about where to live" - that is entirely 
accurate. Part of the problem with a lack of (say) doctors in regional 
areas is purely social and probably can't be solved by policy: there's 
no cachet in living in Bathurst or Albury. When people are acculturated 
to the idea that success in medicine means a home in the eastern suburbs 
of Sydney (or Toorak) and a Macquarie Street practice, how do you get a 
specialist to work in the regions?

Getting out of order, I want to address one more point:
> 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
You don't have to get far outside the cities for the infrastructure to 
be inadequate; nor do you have to disappear into the Outer Barcoo to get 
to places where competition doesn't go. Most of the exchanges on the 
Blue Mountains, for example - which all up covers a population of 
75,000-plus - have no competitive DSLAMs in them. The attractors to 
competition are more complex than population alone.

Cheers,
RC