The broadband transformation: Gottliebsen

We have had many interviews that have unveiled significant developments for the business community but it will be a long time before we have a more significant national blueprint than emerged from the session with Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.

Tanner set out an Australian blueprint for the next decade that has few precedents in Australian post-war history.

Tanner’s underlying premise is that we cannot keep running enormous current account deficits indefinitely. Traditionally Australians have hoped for a rise in metal prices to overcome the problem. Tanner has a totally different vision. He believes that the national broadband network will dramatically improve the productivity of the Australian nation and transform the way we live and work.

The daily rush to a capital city will end because powerful broadband can go close to duplicating personal contact. It makes remote medicine feasible, so not only will doctors export their services but there will be a dramatic fall in the need for hospital beds.

And the transformation affects industry after industry. Tanner equates the broadband network’s productivity gains to the introduction of electricity, and he believes that companies like Telstra and Optus have the opportunity of a lifetime.

Yesterday I talked to a group of students who had originally come to listen to my budget talk. After answering their economic questions, I told them to shape their careers (in whatever field they chose) around adapting to the broadband opportunity.

Readers will recall that I was critical of the previous government for its broadband dithering. That’s why I now praise Stephen Conroy for having the courage to make a nation-building decision.

But Tanner takes the Conroy vision much further. He admits that there could conceivably be further measures to overcome the local ramifications of the global crisis. But once it’s over, being in government will come down to the hard grind of reducing expenditure.

This is, of course, Tanner’s specialty – but he is clearly right unless we run into another minerals boom. That means that future elections will be about the management ability of the combatants, rather than the amount of money they promise to spend.

And if Tanner is right about the significance of world-class broadband for Australia, then we will decentralise geographically and the mountain of proposed infrastructure projects that are not part of decentralisation will simply not be required.

Tanner’s vision may be wrong, but no one can afford not to take it into account because it is the linchpin of what the current Government is doing.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator