[LINK] Business fetishism (was Re: LINK] Four Corners NBN)

[Tom Worthington]

Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> Recheck the math, Tom. "Several thousand billion"? I don't think even 
> the NBN plus healthcare plus education runs into the *trillions*  ...

The NBN is projected to cost $42B over 9.5 years (1). Health care in 
Australia costs about $1072B a year (2) and education $628B (3). So 
allowing for inflation, over the NBN's construction period, the NBN, 
health and education will cost about two thousand billion dollars.

My point was that the NBN is relatively cheap compared to the
expenditure made in other areas, such as health and education. It will 
only take a small saving through e-health or e-learning to pay for the 
NBN. But implementing e-health and e-learning will require more up front 
investment than the NBN and require changes to health and education 
systems, which will be controversial.

Implementing e-health and e-learning will require different designs and 
placement of health centres and schools. It is not just a matter of 
putting broadband connections into existing buildings. Also requires 
retraining of thousands of staff and changes to emloyment.

Adjusting public expenditure to take advantage of the NBN will require 
some difficult public policy decisions. Apart from the up front cost of 
buildings and staff training, it will result in the withdrawal of some 
physical facilities and different jobs and services.

The issue of a few thousand people not getting copper cable has been 
controversial, although this is a planned part of the NBN process: 
<http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2011-April/093243.html>.
The government policy is to replace copper cable with fibre optics. A 
consequence of this is that those areas where it is not feasible to 
provide fibre optic cable will get wireless. This may be seen in a 
reduction of service, compared with copper cable. Similarly, some 
medical facilities and schools will close, to be replaced with online 
services. This may be seen as a reduction in services, even though the 
new service is superior overall.

In some cases facilities may not look that different from the outside, 
but be different on the inside and be run differently. As an example a 
few weeks ago I attended a learning commons conference with librarians 
and architects. Speaker after speaker got up and said: "We gutted out 
1970s dull brick library, took out the books, put in computers and 
bright furnishing and called it a "learning commons". Along with the 
architecture, comes a new style of learning called "Heutagogy", or 
self-determined learning: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/search/label/Learning%20Commons%20Development%20and%20Design%20Forum>.

Something similar is happening with primary and secondary schools. 
Examples are St Monica’s Primary, North Parramatta (NSW) multi-purpose 
learning centre 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/03/open-plan-learning-centres-for-primary.html> 
and the Beehive Montessori School at Mosman Park (WA) 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/04/architecture-for-new-education.html>.

With health I expect a similar trend, with medical centres having fewer 
small cubical rooms for one patient and one doctor. Instead there may be 
rooms equipped with a video conference system which a nurse operates to 
allow a patient to be examined remotely by a specialist. Other rooms 
might have group therapy sessions and others a cyber cafe where patients 
  undertake treatment online.

This may all come as a shock to those who expected the NBN to just be 
tacked onto old fashioned medicine and health. There will be very few 
instances of students in a "class" with a "teacher" and of patients in a 
"surgery" with a "doctor". The result will be an improvment in public 
services, but at a cost and not without controversy.

Figures from:

1. NBN:
<http://www.nbn.gov.au/content/how-will-it-benefit-australian-economy>.
2. Health $112.8B per year:
years <http://www.aihw.gov.au/publication-detail/?id=6442472450>
3. Education $66.1b per year:
<http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/0E0701553637F843CA25773700169C99?opendocument> 




-- 
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