SUNRAYSIA’S community leaders should be building a case now for an early rollout of the National Broadband Network across Sunraysia, one of the world’s leading policy advisers on broadband communications said yesterday.
Speaking to an audience of around 100 people at a Mildura-Deakin Rotary’s network breakfast at the Mildura Settlers Club yesterday, Paul Budde, managing director of Paul Budde Communications, urged Mildura Rural City and Wentworth Shire councils to take leadership of the bid to bring the National Broadband Network (NBN) here.
He said enormous economic and social development opportunities would flow to early-adopter communities.
The Mildura Development Corporation and the Loddon-Mallee Regional Development Association sponsored yesterday’s visit by Mr Budde, and Bruce Windsor, chief information officer for Loddon-Mallee Rural Health.
Mr Budde warned that he knew of politicians who, for purely political reasons, were undermining efforts by Mildura and Bendigo to gain early access to the new $35 billion high-speed optical fibre telecommunications network.
He singled out Federal Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, a strong supporter of a new national broadband network under the former Howard Government, for his back-flip in joining Tony Abbots’ Liberals in Opposition to oppose the most important infrastructure project for rural and regional communities in Australia’s history.
The NBN was a vital infrastructure project, like the electricity, gas, and railway networks.
It was not about today, but tomorrow, and should enjoy bipartisan political support, instead of being exploited for short-term political advantage.
Political opposition to major infrastructure projects was nothing new – politicians had opposed the plan to develop a national electricity network in the US more than a century ago.
“They were opposed to building a very expensive electricity network when everyone already had candles,” he said.
He said Australia’s big cities were going to do everything they could to ensure they got access to the NBN before regional Australia.
In 2005, Nationals politicians, including Senator Joyce, had gone on every regional radio station across Australia to talk about the benefits of broadband for regional communities.
“The Nationals have since abandoned the idea, and the broadband bus is no longer in regional Australia, but in the cities,” Mr Budde said.
“It’s an absolutely sad story. In 2005, it was all about the regions.
“If you don’t win back that ground, you’re going to be on the end of the list. The big cities aren’t stupid – they understand the importance of broadband.
“I really challenge you – I beg you – to take the lead, get your councillors and your community to understand what broadband is, and what it can do for this community.”
Australia and the US were among the only countries in the world that lacked bipartisan political support for broadband.
Even in Rwanda, one of Africa’s poorest nations, there was strong bipartisan support for a national “fibre to the hut” network.
The Federal Opposition was baulking at the estimated $36 billion capital cost of a national fibre-to-the-home broadband network, when the NBN would save government $30 billion in health costs alone within 10 years of its completion – without factoring in its enormous benefits for education and commerce. It’s not a lot of money, when you look at it like that.
“Lots of people ask me why on Earth we need fibre to the home – they say they don’t want to download 50 movies in a night,” he said.
“Our older generations are happy with ADSL or wireless Internet – why should we spend $36 billion on new broadband infrastructure?”
Mr Budde said the NBN’s importance went far beyond the capacity to download a whole movie in a few seconds.
On the issue of the NBN’s capacity to slash healthcare costs, he said his 87-year-old mother visited the doctor three times a week, and went to hospital frequently for her health problems.
“We incur around 80 to 90 per cent of our lifetime healthcare costs in the last 10 years of life,” he said.
If the NBN could provide some of those consultations and medical advice at home, via high-definition video and telephone, elderly or chronically ill individuals would not need to make so many visits to the doctor in person.
“That would save an enormous amount of money.”
Mr Budde said that with remote healthcare monitoring devices, the NBN could link every bedroom in Australia directly to hospital on an as-needed basis, with enormous savings in the cost of hospital beds.
National telephony carrier Telstra, facing the imminent demise of its copper network, and the advent of free telephony via the Internet, was actively exploring new business opportunities in the e-health field.
Mr Budde’s hobby is medieval history.
“If we could take Pierre Abelard [12th century French scholar and philosopher] and place him in front of a modern university, he would still recognise it as a university,” he said.
“My wife is one of 10 mature adults among about 200 arts students in her arts class at the University of Sydney.
“Half the kids are not listening to the lecture – they’re working with their iPhones or tablet displays. They’re bored stiff with education the way it has been done for centuries.
“How wrong are we? Kids are voting with their feet. We have to bring education to the kids, not the other way around. We need to change the system, to restart education in a totally different way.”
Mr Budde said such changes would probably not be complete in his lifetime – they could take 30 to 40 years, but the NBN would be the key driver of the change.
Sunraysia needed a strong local leadership group to educate the community about the advantages and opportunities offered by broadband, and to act as a go-between for the community and the national operator, the NBN Co.
The leadership group should foster a can-do approach, as Wyong, on the NSW central coast, had done.
“Wyong desperately wanted to be among the first to get the NBN, and they’re into their rollout now,” he said.
“We need local groups that can provide after-care service, to help our hypothetical 87-year-old patient to communicate with her doctor, to help business, and to handle local problems when it’s being installed, instead of complaining to NBN Co.
“You can do that in a smaller community like Mildura. You can create community awareness of the benefits. You can’t do that in a big city like Sydney or Melbourne.
“You need to work with Swan Hill and Bendigo to get a high-level group together to prepare and lobby for the early rollout of the NBN in the Loddon-Mallee region.
“I’d like to see the mayors of those cities get together and give their blessing to the idea, and say ‘This is going to happen’. Leadership is important.”
This article appeared in Wednesday's Sunraysia Daily 16-11-2011.
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