Rudd Speeds Up Campaign
Rudd Speeds Up Campaign
March 22, 2007: The Australian Labor Party has announced plans for a national broadband network in an election promise worth $4.7 billion.
According to the Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd, this promise would offer 98 percent of Australians a broadband service up to 40 times faster than what they currently access.
The ALP says $4.7 billion will be drawn from the existing communications fund alongside the Future Fund’s 17 percent share of Telstra and funding from the private sector.
Rudd labelled the move ‘nation building’ as a means to securing Australia’s economic future. “Nation building in the 19th century was about building a new national railway network for Australia,” he said. “Nation building for the 21st century lies in building a new national broadband network. It’s part of our pathway to the future.” Rudd did not clarify what the 20th Century was all about.
The announcement comes just weeks after the Federal Minister for Communications, IT and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan, made a pledge to deliver a $162.5 million Australian Broadband Guarantee. Coonan says the guarantee will enable Australians to access broadband services regardless of where they live.
But the definition of broadband in Australia is different to the rest of the world. Australia defines broadband access speed as equal to or greater than 256 kilobits per seconds. Other countries, particularly in Asia, only consider access ‘broadband’ when it hit minimum speeds that can be quoted in megabits.
Rudd says Australia has a significant access problem when compared to international comparative data. Australia has the 17th broadband take-up rate across the OECD, but when it comes to measuring world broadband bandwidth, Australia sits in just the 25th spot.
In Victoria, the Minister for Information Communication Tim Holding has recently lashed out at the Howard Government for the state of regional Victoria’s broadband service.
“Broadband services in Australian cities are second rate by world standards, while regional Victoria is suffering from a third world service,” said Holding.
The Minister backed up his statements with a recent report from the Victorian Department of Infrastructure. Through economic modelling the report concludes that by 2015, an IT industry equipped with 21st Century broadband has the potential to add $15 billion to Victoria’s Gross State Product. Such a figure would create 153,000 new jobs.