Soft and Music

The latest political material has just reached our household in the form of a twenty three page brochure. Naturally, given this sort of stuff does not come out too often, and that it is in the lead up to an election, I cannot help being a tad bit cynical. Especially when it opens with this Message From the Prime Minister:  "There is nothing more important than ensuring our children safe. That's why the Australian Government has created the $189-million Net Alert – Protecting Families Online program. This program combines education, parental support and the offer of free internet content filters – all effective tools to help protect children from illegal and offensive material."

Sitting down with the website, the money being spent appears almost scandalous. School programs on internet safety, places parents can get internet filters from, and the expansion of the Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist. Now, I'm not going to knock parents for wanting to protect their children, even if I disapprove of religious indoctrination, but these programs are simply meaningless. And as suggested by Roy Eccleston in the latest edition of The Bulletin, eduction should be focussed on teaching kids how to be more discerning about what they believe. If you want kids to be safe they need, if anything, more time on the net to develop those critical thinking skills for evaluating potentially fraudulent content.

That being said, this brochure is also a subtle piece of propaganda and a distraction from the real issues facing telecommunications in Australia. Not only does the brochure contain little in the way of new information, but that information is slanted and plays into the politics of fear. For example, in one section on internet predators, the brochure cites a recent study, where 40 per cent of children who chat online said they had been contacted by someone they didn't know. To those unfamiliar with internet technology this is designed to sound scary, but anyone who is familiar with the technology would probably realize this overstates the threat.

As Rod Nockles, internet safety director of MySpace, told Background Briefing in July:

When the media for instance, engage in this subject, some of them tend to run it as a very sort of hysterical approach that every person is being pursued by a paedophile on the Internet. When you do that, an important learning opportunity is being lost, because what tends to happen is that the parents and the teachers become overwhelmed…and so they tend to then adopt a prohibition approach and say, 'We've got to get our kids off the Internet, this is just too dangerous an environment for them.'

…the other thing that happens is that the very people that you're trying to reach, the young people that you're trying to engage in a safety dialogue, become very cynical…Their response to an overblown fear campaign approach, is… they sort of suggest 'Look, this is no more than an example of previous generations who don't understand our environment, don't understand what we are doing, simply trying to lecture us.'

The question we have to ask at this point, in light of the vast amount of public money being spent on promoting the incumbent government's policies in the lead up to the immanent election campaign, is weather this is a well intentioned waste of tax-payers money or a fear tactic to neutralize and distract from the real telecommunications issue of broadband coverage and speed.

In March, the Australian Labor Party made an election promise to lay new fibre optic infrastructure nation wide in order to improve the Australia's broadband capacity. The plan is for universal outlay of fibre-to-node (ie. replacing the old ISDN network that runs between the telephone exchanges) with a 50-50 split between government and private funding, and having industry bid for the construction rights based on the lowest access fee that they would charge resellers.

Ultimately, the goal of this plan is to make bandwidth cheaper for the community, and as some have pointed out, broadband has been less available and more expensive in Australia primarily due to limitations on the equipment.

The Howard government's response was to quickly enact its own plan for next two years, which will take a laissez-faire approach to fibre optics in the cities coupled with financial support for an Optus-Elders partnership aimed a investing in WiMax and ADSL2 for rural telecommunications.

Admittedly, the decision does appear more practical and reasonable than the proposal by Rudd and the Opposition prima facie. However, this policy is very short term, in that it does not take into account the long term growth of demand.

Case in point, the signal for WiMax must compete with radio, television and mobile telephony for the space available in the non-visible spectrum. Even if we progressively phase out competitors as the demand for data rises, the amount of bandwidth available to communities will be limited by the both the amount of space we can allocate to users and the available bandwidth between the telephone exchanges.

It is unfortunate that since Labor's announcement and the Howard government's decision, experienced journalists have failed to properly scrutinize the respective policies despite the good deal of media attention paid to the state of Australia's telecommunications. Maybe because the average person does not understand broadband beyond it being faster than dial-up and freeing up your phone line. Or perhaps because journalists do not consider broadband a newsworthy issue.

In any case, it is, and that ignorance presents a problem. The demand and availability of bandwidth and data is driven by both consumer and business interests and if demand continues to grow without raising the network capacity, the price of data will both raise overheads and provide a disincentive for attracting high-tech and information intensive industries.

The use of a public relations campaign in place of genuine telecommunications reform highlights the governments weakness in two ways. First, that the technology is not well understood, and second, that they feel there are cheaper ways to of appealing to the mainstream electorate. By taking a few steps in regional Australia while also pandering to the fear of change within the electorate, they present themselves as more fiscally responsible than their decisions really are.

Of course, this distraction and non-solution will probably go down well in most parts of the electorate so long as people fail to grasp the opportunity being presented by the web. After all, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports computer ownership and internet access within homes has grown significantly since 1998, but appears to have plateaued around 70 and 60 per cent respectively. And as suggested by a recent report (pdf) for the Department of Communications, Technology and the Arts, the key factors inhibiting rural uptake are the lack of education, ageing populations and the perceived/real costs involved; aside from obvious infrastructure issues.

So long as the public lack experience and understanding, all future debates will be distracted from the real issues of infrastructure and instead revolve around philosophical, cultural and psychological impacts. And while child safety and how Google is making us stupid might seem like the big issues of the information age, they are relatively minor by comparison.