Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (2 May) . . Page.. 1371 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

We need to acknowledge that this as a major exercise and to try to be positive about efforts being made to deal with it. When I was a first year student at the University of New England, quite some time ago-I spent a year at the University of New England before I came down to the ANU-one of the lecturers in the politics course was Professor Colin Tatz, a black academic who had some very interesting views about power. He said that in a contemporary society, where the rule of force has been displaced by other factors, power goes to those who are best informed, and those with a capacity to obtain and use information effectively will be those ultimately who rule. That is a very telling comment in light of this debate. The Internet presents, above anything else, an enormous avenue for access to information. If the information is flowing unevenly to certain parts of the community, it follows that certain parts of the community are less likely to have the power that information provides.

Mr Corbell said in his remarks that he believed the central issue in providing that access was overcoming the inconvenience people faced by not having the technology in their own homes. I disagree with that. I do not think that is a central issue at all. I think access, by which I mean the form of information that is available to you, whatever place you might happen to go to get it, is the central issue. People with very poor and limited means of access in a public library, a workplace or a home, wherever it might be, will be significantly disadvantaged versus those with very good access. The issue is not where you obtain the access; it is the extent of your access and the nature of your access.

Acquiring the skills to access the Internet is a much more significant issue than the places where it is actually undertaken. Rightly, the task force focused on how people acquire the skills. The public already have free access to the Internet in all of the ACT's eight public libraries. But that does not overcome the barrier of the digital divide, because many people who pass through the doors of those libraries would no more go to the computer terminal and sit down and access it to find out about what is happening in the United States or how to solder a piece of metal, or whatever it might be they want to find out about, than they would think about going to the section on Swahili and pick up a book and read it. They do not have the skills required to make that transition. That is why it is vitally important that one of the first tasks we undertake in this exercise is to give people who have access-that is the first step-the skills to be able to use the access.

Mr Corbell made the comment that it should be our goal to provide for a completely accessed city where everybody is digitally connected. I suppose that is an ambition that we would all hope for, in the sense that we would all hope that there would no longer be any poor people or no longer any people who are unhappy, or whatever it might, but I think, with great respect to Mr Corbell, that is a somewhat unattainable goal. There will always be people who do not want access to the Internet, for whatever reason-some perhaps very good reasons-and we should not expect that they will be obtaining that access if they do not want it. But for everyone who wants it, we should be focusing on the attainable goal of reasonable means of getting it.

At the moment the biggest barrier is not getting to the terminals. I do not think the libraries would say that the terminals are completely inaccessible because of the volume of people wanting to use them. The problem is the skills needed and the sense of it being an attainable goal to sit down at a computer terminal and get logged on and go off and find out what you want.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .