Spin Dentist - Flossing the plaque out of Aussie Politics

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The battle lines are drawn. The battle for hearts and minds of the Australian electorate this year will be staged around....the environment? national security? interest rates?
Actually, Broadband speeds!
Labor today have outlined a new plan to upgrade the national telecommunications infrastructure so that 98% of the Australian population will have access to broadband speeds 40 times faster than they do today. Wow. How could they pull off such a masterstroke of technological advancement? Who will pay for such an outlandish scheme? The Future Fund of course!
By naming the Future Fund, "The Future Fund", the government has ensured that it's use can be as generically applied as it's name. If they had called it "The public servant Superannuation Stockpile", things might be a little different.
But they didn't, and Labor are eyeing it off as the Australian telecommunications infrastructure's saviour from going the way of the railways. And rightly so. The Future fund is made up of the proceeds from the sale of T3, the 3rd Share offering of Telstra, plus any unsold shares from that issue. Now that Telstra is a private company, they are only obliged to look out for the interests of their shareholders, and not the nation at large. Therefore, despite having a monopoly on the country's telco infrastructure, there is no real incentive for it to invest collossal amounts of money into improving the country's infrastructure, as the country is wide and the population sparse. It isn't in the best interests of the shareholders. Investment may improve the country's fortunes, but not necessarily Telstra's.
So Labor have taken the bull by the horns and are proposing to dip into the Future Fund, to use the proceeds of selling off the Australian Telco infrastructure to greatly enhance it's infrastructure. This will supposedly get Australia up to speed with the rest of the industrialised world, giving us a network on par with everyone else...
So is this investment really necessary? Will this really enhance Australia's competitiveness in the world?
Perhaps. Little Timmy downloading the 6th Season of "Lost" in his bedroom will think so, but it goes much further than Little Timmy (as is sometimes the case). Australia is a bloody long way from anywhere. That's a fact. But in this international climate of free trade agreements, Australia needs to be open for business. Distance cannot be a barrier. For a long time we have had the smarts. While we still dig things out of the ground for a dollar we also sell know how. Industry leaders recognise the fact that we need to get closer to the rest of the world, in order to remain competitive. As Rudd puts it, we need to engage in "Nation building for the 21st Century".

Labels: Australian Politics, Broadband, Federal Election, Kevin Rudd, Telstra

posted by The Dentist @ 10:20 pm