Page 4334 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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Like all Canberrans, our most vulnerable will benefit greatly from the rollout of the national broadband network. My department works hard to ensure these people are connected to the services and supports they need to facilitate positive involvement in the community and that broadband delivers the information in a way that is increasingly required by our society.
It has often been said that education is the great leveller in our society, and I believe that high speed broadband also has a significant role to play in making our society fairer and more inclusive. It is not simply a “$43 billion high-tech babysitter”, as Graeme Wood from wotif.com was flippantly quoted in today’s Australian as saying. If Brendan Smyth actually understood how an economic cost-benefit analysis works, he would understand that it is completely incapable of producing even a marginally meaningful result on a project like the NBN. Moreover, a cost-benefit analysis would only estimate the net private benefit that a given investment opportunity would be expected to deliver and would ignore the costs and benefits that people and organisations would experience as a result of the investment choice.
But the national broadband network will enable people to be connected to services, employment and each other like they never have been before. There are three key benefits of high speed broadband which will be delivered by the NBN to our community from the perspective of my portfolio. First, high speed broadband will improve people’s access to services. We know that currently people shop online, purchasing goods and services and using the internet to acquire information from vast databases, at home and elsewhere. ABS data from 2009 shows that nearly 60 per cent of most age groups in Australia and 40 per cent of people in the over-65 age bracket purchased goods or services online within a 12-month period. Government services, such as some ACT government concessions, motor vehicle registration renewals and participation in ACT government community-government consultations can now be accessed online.
But that is what we do now. As the paradigm of broadband shifts, so will the depth of the services that we access change into the future. High speed broadband may make it increasingly easy for people who now find it difficult to physically get to particular services, because of disability, young children or cost. The national broadband network may improve access to employment, allowing some people to work more flexibly at home, helping them manage the demands of home and work—and maybe even their disability.
It is in this way that high speed broadband offers the opportunity for improved social inclusion. It allows people to stay in contact with family and friends when even geographically separate. We know that many families have other family members interstate—and, for migrants, their families are often overseas. The future of broadband allows all of us to stay connected, using rich and interacting video conferencing at home with friends—or even with our colleagues in the workplace. All citizens in the Canberra community will stand to gain from improved access to services, flexibility of employment and greater social inclusion.
However, there is a danger that our community will rely ever more on internet technology for people’s participation in services, employment and communication
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