Speech for CeBIT Access Conference

Session 1: Infrastructure and Policies

Improving ICT infrastructure and the Opportunities for Australian Business and Society.

12th May 2009

The Opportunities for the ICT sector and society in light of the significant policy developments of the national broadband network and the digital education revolution.

Introduction

Today I intend to focus on the significant opportunity that the federal Labor government’s national broadband network and digital education revolution presents for all spheres of Australian society and economy.

I preface my comments by reflecting on a frustrating decade in the federal parliament knowing in my heart that Australia could achieve so much more in the information and communication technology sector across both the public and private sectors. This is not to say we have not punched above our weight and achieved great things anyway, but I put to you that in large part it has been in spite of poor leadership and an ad-hoc approach to ICT-related policy.

Having participated in every senate inquiry relating to telecommunications and information technology for the last 13 years, I am in a position to reflect on just how much has changed with a change to a federal Labor government.

Two dramatic and transformative policies for Australia create a modern, solid foundation for our economy and society to build on.

The first transformative policy is the national broadband network. Can I say that I did not think I would ever see a policy announced in my time in public office that so closely reflected what I considered to be the holy grail of national, future-proof broadband networks. The day of the announcement, I blogged that it was like a dream come true, and when you have been pushing for it for a long as I have, it was a special moment that re-affirmed my faith in the democratic processes that I have opted into as a politician.

The fibre-to-the-premises network is the end game for fixed networks. Sure, speeds will increase as new technologies develop, but that is like saying cars have improved in the last forty years. Taking the FTTP to homes and businesses is like building a highway to the front door

Fibre to the premises will put Australia on par with connectivity leaders like Japan for the first time. Last year Australia scored 8th in the world for household penetration (59%) but 28th for average download speed (1.7MB) [2008 ITIF broadband ratings]. Australians want faster access, and I know with the right infrastructure and support, we can be leaders in the global information economy.

The second transformative policy is the digital education revolution. The investment of $12.4 billion into secondary schools ICT begins to address the critical issue of technological literacy in the next generation. Australia is well placed to foster future generations of empowered, confident citizens ready to tackle the many challenges of the 21st century, and we have a responsibility to ensure this policy evolves to ensure that technology is used to stimulate creativity, innovative learning and good ICT skills, rather than as just another platform to achieve traditional learning outcomes,

I mentioned in my introduction that the transformative effects of both of these policies present opportunities across the private and public sector. These often blur. For example, it is often public sector ICT innovation that can stimulate new ideas and value adding opportunities for business and vice-versa, where the ICT sector, particularly small companies bring their dynamism to solve business problems for complex service delivery challenges in the public sector.

However, for the purposes of this presentation I want to outline what I see as the major transformative effect of both the NBN and the DER firstly on the public sector, in particular for open government, and for the ICT business sector which can leverage the change for growth and innovation.

This last point is critical as while the recession we are currently experiencing feels like a lead weight, the federal government’s stimulus packages ensures that the infrastructure build will proceed creating an important opportunity for reorganising and refocusing our ICT industry development strategies.

Section One – Open Government and Participatory Democracy

As technology and communications are developing and becoming ubiquitous, there is a responsibility on the part of governments all around the world to react faster and more efficiently. High speed Internet access in Australia will provide more opportunities for taking government services online, which also means more opportunities to engage the public in government processes in an open and democratic way,

Last week I ran the first of a new series of events called Public Spheres, where anyone can participate online or in person in a topic of interest, and the outcomes are collated into a briefing paper and made available both publicly and to appropriate channels in government. We are using blogging, video streaming, and Twitter amongst other online tools to create an accessible environment for gathering ideas and expertise.

This type of approach harnesses the extraordinary expertise we have in Australian society: in government, industry and particularly in the broader community. It also improves transparency and makes it much easier for people to contribute in a focused way to areas of public policy in which they have an interest or expertise. It also provides a mechanism for online and transparent peer review of presented ideas, a powerful and important step in balancing the many perspectives put to Government.

Some of my colleagues in government are also looking at open government initiatives.

Senator Faulkner gave a speech last week at the National Archives of Australia to launch Information Awareness Month. He spoke about the advent of Web 2.0 providing a wide range of ways for Australians to both access government information and engage with government decision-making.

Senator Faulkner also emphasised the need for standard formats to ensure accessibility and the necessity for government agencies to move towards a culture of openness and transparency as a matter of course.

As my contribution to Information Awareness Month, we will be running another Public Sphere event around opening access to data in Government for public and commercial use. The information will be on my website at www.katelundy.com.au in the coming week.

The recently announced position of the federal Information Commissioner will provide oversight to the new openness as well having a role in external merits review of FOI decisions.

The drafts of the both the Information Commissioner Bill 2009 and Freedom of Information (Reform) Bill 2009 are already in the public domain for comment.

To assist in achieving a cultural change towards openness, the Bill also implements a new Commonwealth Government publication scheme which will mandate agencies to publish what they lawful can, not merely encourage it as the current system provides.

Perhaps most reassuring was the Minister emphasis that the new objects of the FOI Act recognises the importance to Australia’s democracy of a strong Freedom of Information regime. You will be inspired to hear that these reforms are, in the Minister’s words: “intended to increase public participation in Government processes, leading to better informed decision –making. He went on to say “We believe they will increase scrutiny, discussion, comment and review of the Government’s activities” He concluded by stating that the reforms are based on the principle that information held by the Government is to managed for public purposes, and is a national resource.

With a high bandwidth network in place, the ease of moving information around and will usher in new disciplines for standards ensuring searchable records and government documentation.

It’s good to see that Senator Faulkner’s principles of openness and tangible legislative moves to give them effect have been supported in other portfolios.

I am particularly enthused by the three recommendations in the Innovation Review that relate to the need for a National Information Strategy built on principles of transparency and open, auditable standards, open publishing and recognise the public value in and important role of public information repositories including cultural agencies in innovation and research.

In the context of the NBN citizen, being able to research and source large digital information, knowledge and images without the constraints of slow Internet access is the mere tip of the iceberg. I believe that opportunities for collaboration and creativity through social networks will blossom. I have also seen the hard numbers of the economic benefit that can be derived from making Government data openly accessible, such as the US case study of the public repository of geospatial data public available for public and private research, which has led to many development and commercialisation opportunities.

The time is right for the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Carr, to respond positively to these and other astute recommendations contained in the Innovation Review in the imminent federal budget. This would complement the efforts of Senator Faulkner and really start to leverage the benefits of openness in the public sector to drive the information economy forward.

Critically, these policies start to build a foundation of open government that the presence of a national broadband network will take to new heights.

Senator Conroy will soon be launching the Digital Economy Future Directions paper, and the earlier draft from late last year had significant emphasis on open access to public sector information, geospatial data, skills and green ICT. It deals with new ICT opportunities and challenges, and will be an important part in the Digital Economy discussion.

This aspect of Senator Conroy’s portfolio will ascend as the plans to build the NBN come together. It is incredibly important that the public conversation turns to the transformative effect that a universal high bandwidth network will have in Australia. His recent speech to the Press Club articulated a raft of services and functions that will improve quality of life and create opportunity for business growth.

Another great example of open government policy in action is from across the Tasman is how the New Zealand Government has used wikis for the development and public feedback on new Parliamentary Acts. In one case they had 20 times the normal amount of feedback, which is largely because the process of contributing was so much easier than traditional feedback mechanisms in government.

Lindsay Tanner late last year blogged about some of the Web 2.0 opportunities for government. He also spoke about blogging for public servants, and how he was organising a trial government blog. He called for public opinion on the blog post, and received some excellent, and in some cases highly entertaining, feedback. Minister Tanner has foreshadowed announcing specific government Web 2.0 trials to be managed by AGIMO during his presentation at CeBIT.

Twitter is a tool that several politicians have been successfully using. I only started on Twitter three months ago, and have already found it a valuable tool for public feedback and interaction, especially for real time feedback for the Public Sphere event last week.

PM Kevin Rudd tweets regularly with comments and links to new initiatives and policy.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has been a Twitter regular for a long time, and is taking a personal approach in communicating with the public.

As more online and public lines of communications emerge and are adopted by political leaders we will naturally see more transparency in Government provided care is taken to make sure online communications create a genuine conversation, and are not used as just another way to spin a line. This is a tough challenge and I expect there will be successes and failures and everything in between. Most importantly these developments will hopefully get more Australian engaged in the political process.

Of course, high speed Internet access also brings or broadens some challenges, as we found in the Public Sphere event last week, challenges such as privacy and security concerns, creating more open markets, sustainability, the evolution of the Telco industry and open access to data just to name a few. These are all issues that we can better work through with more open communication with the ICT industry and communities of interest. The briefing paper from the first Public Sphere event will be online in the coming days.

Open Government is not just a question for politicians and government agencies, public institutions have a significant role to play, be they our national cultural institutions or publicly funded media organisations.

An exceptional example of a public institution contributing to open government, is the ABC’s Q and A show, which has provided a public forum for political debate, using technologies such as chat, video and the web to engage people from all over Australia. Indeed the online community growing around the Q&A program means the topics and perspectives put forward continue to be discussed in the general public beyond the show itself. This means a healthy and regular injection of democratic engagement for Australia. I am confident these kinds of initiatives will continue to improve and grow as the digital divide is closed over time.

As someone who has been passionate about ICT for over 13 years, I will do my part to take us forward with new open government initiatives, and raise the bar for online public engagement in government process and policy. I call upon my colleagues to prioritise open government in all portfolios as a key area to improve public engagement and a more democratic society.

Section Two – ICT industry development

The government is the largest procurer of ICT in Australia, and as such the recommendations found in the Gershon review combined with the national broadband network provides some key opportunities for the Australian ICT sector.

For many years I have advocated that Government’s need to be smarter in how they procure IT, and make sure that the innovative, more nimble companies in the market get a fair crack at the contracts.

Gershon agrees. On the back of some harsh criticism of the current system of ICT procurement which included weak governance of pan government ICT, insufficient challenge and scrutiny to business-as-usual ICT funding, the lack of efficiency and effectiveness in the current approach and a disconnect between the government’s overall sustainability agenda and its ability to understand and manage the energy costs and carbon footprint of ICT.

With the Government having accepted all of the recommendations, there is no doubt the Gershon review will have an impact on how ICT services are contracted by Government. The review recommends a target of moving the current ratio of 77:23 split between Business-as-usual and new capability finding to 70:30 in financial year 2011-12.

Critically, and I don’t believe this is well know in the industry, Gershon recommended that “50% of the savings generated be transferred to a central fund for reinvestment in projects to improve efficiency and effectiveness of ICT business-as-usual activities, such as replacement of legacy software and hardware with high support and maintenance costs.”

This recommendation presents many opportunities the Australian ICT sector to show off new solutions and approaches to help government agencies with efficiency gains and better effectiveness.

Also, the report includes recommendations about consolidation of services such as data hosting which the new network will significantly help with.

For these and many other reasons, it is a critical time for government to have clear policy and requirements around open standards and open access, particularly to public data.

Having strong and enforceable policy across agencies about open standards and access has been lacking in the past with appallingly inefficient results through lack of compliance with things like electronic record keeping.

For this reason I was actually excited when I saw the Gershon recommendation to establish a “Ministerial Committee on ICT to be responsible for the key whole-of-government ICT policies and the overall strategic vision for how ICT should support the achievements of the Government’s outcomes and wider policy agenda.”

This is backed in with a Secretaries’ ICT Governance Board with a strong mandate from the government to drive the review recommendations forward.

These structures are really music to my ears, provided of course the Government is the smart, future orientated purchaser I know we are capable of being. Perhaps more than any other announcement, the national broadband network completes the innovation cycle needed to drive the Government’s investment in ICT and online services. As one person put in at my public sphere forum last week, “what would you do if bandwidth was no limitation? It’s an exciting question. It is a very exciting question for government. I know you don’t need reminding that the Government spends billions

And if it an exciting question for government, then it is a very, very exciting question for the innovative, nimble companies that already have their value propositions based on a light carbon footprint and thinking, literally, in the cloud.

I want to now focus a little on the ICT industry sector and offer some thoughts on the magnitude of the opportunity the NBN provides.

The national broadband network – through both the technical vision and the setup of a more competitive industry around broadband – will provide an affordable and high speed network which will transform the Australian ICT industry. By definition, it is the ICT sector that will innovate with new applications, services and systems to optimise the NBN for business, community, citizens and government.

The Australian ICT industry will see enormous opportunities for local services and hosting grow, because the amount of data people desire will rapidly grow with a faster network: as will the desire of local organisations to store data within Australian jurisdiction due to privacy legislation and security concerns.

Local media and content organisations will be more able to deliver high quality content to the Australian public, and in an open market, this would be cheaper to deliver than content from overseas, opening up excellent opportunities for local companies and local content.

On the point of local content, Australian content contributes to our collective sense of identity. For this reason investment in Australian video, television and film production is a very important complementary policy for the national broadband network investment. As demand for digital content grows, it is essential that a reasonable proportion of high quality Australian material is produced.

There are many innovative and brilliant small Australian ICT companies and often enough they have a majority of their sales overseas. Often enough, they have to move overseas to support their clients, or to take advantage of investment opportunities they can’t find locally. With high speed Internet access, more businesses will be able to deliver services internationally without having to move.

We need to seriously look at the ICT investment opportunities in Australia to help grow and support the local ICT sector. Every company that has to move overseas is a company that is taking smart Australians and smart ideas away from the Australian economy.

Many ICT and other professionals are increasingly taking the opportunities presented by online access to work from home, and this will dramatically change both the typical work environment, and how and where people live. The NBN will assist in this transition as high speed Internet access means better telecommunications, better real-time online collaboration and of course, faster data transfer.

The opportunity for the ICT industry to provide services and solutions in this area will increase as every industry will have the opportunity to offer more flexible work conditions using online tools. There are of course some great environmental benefits from this in reduced travel, and the reduction of large populations living in inefficient environments.

Other Green ICT initiatives, such as Smart Grids, mobile computing and virtualisation offer a swathe of opportunities for the ICT industry to assist every market to reduce their environmental impact and costs. The government has a leadership role to play in Green ICT initiatives, to both help create best practices and through implementation, to stimulate the local Green ICT industry.

This is reflected in the Gershon Review as mentioned earlier with the government seeking to, as Gershon tactfully described it, align the government sustainability agenda with the use and management of ICT within the government. It gives me confidence that Senator Conroy’s Digital Economy agenda has been progressing these issues for some time, so the cross-portfolio thinking is there. The government also has a role to play in actively supporting the local ICT sector from a more traditional industry policy perspective. Senator Carr recently announced the formation of a new Information Technology Industry Innovation Council to support the Australian IT industry. This is a good start, and demonstrates a commitment to the growth and development of the local ICT industry.

With commonwealth procurement playing such an important part of growing our IT sector, I know there is also a commitment to making sure that the interests of smaller, innovative companies can genuinely compete. These means a diligent approach to ensuring barriers to participation in tenders are removed.

I also support wholeheartedly the Pearcey Foundation’s push for an independent research bureau that can provide detailed advice on the economic and productivity forecasts in the ICT sector and point to the challenges and growth opportunities with wisdom and foresight.

If we are to achieve our stated vision of becoming a knowledge-based, digitally-empowered economy, it is essential for a publicly funded research bureau to be informing the government on the prospects and trends in the industry sector that provides the technological tools to achieve that vision.

So now the Australian ICT sector has new opportunities, rapidly growing markets in all industries, support from government, and a new globally competitive telecommunications infrastructure on the way.

The ICT sector needs to re-organise, re-invigorate and re-position to lift its status and influence. Australia needs a united and representative advocate to promote our excellent ICT capacity and drive investment. This means jobs and exports: essential to recovery and growth. BITKOM, the German ICT industry group is a good exmple of how a unified voice across telecommunications, ICT and new media can present a world class show case for German capability.

I call upon the Australian ICT industry – particularly local companies – to dive into the deep end with new ideas and solutions that provide the efficiency gains, green solutions and online tools being sought in the market.

Section Three – Skills and education

The last issue I want to talk about is skills. Both the digital economy and open government opportunities require a strong and focused injection of ICT skills, and this needs to start at school.

Currently in Australia we have allowed ICT skills to become more and more watered down, until they have come to mean product-focused office productivity and Internet browsing. This means a vast majority of Australians are disempowered when it comes to ICT, and certainly not in a position to innovate or easily adapt to new concepts or technologies.

The government’s commitment to the digital education revolution provides the strongest possible foundation to go beyond a basic consumer ICT skillset.

If all Australians were equipped with better ICT skills, then we would see innovation happening in all industries at all levels, whether it be a secretary creating an web page for client feedback, a student developing a public profile to show potential employers, or a scientist using bleeding edge open source software to collaborate with her peers on tsunami notification systems. In every industry there are countless opportunities for innovation, however the number of people with appropriate ICT skills is rapidly diminishing.

There is a responsibility on the part of the ICT industry to present to Government what skills are needed now and in the foreseeable future, and it is the responsibility of the Government to ensure that students are well equipped with ICT skills that are both in line with current needs, and adaptable to future directions.

ICT skills such as basic computer literacy, task automation, troubleshooting, and online collaboration are as important as maths and English, and should be taught in school, and our ICT related university degrees need to be robust and adaptable to changing trends, to ensure our ICT professionals meet a high and globally competitive standard.

In Conclusion

The national broadband network creates new and exciting opportunities for Australia government and businesses, in particular the ICT industry. The digital education revolution helps up skill young people to prepare them to meet new challenges and technologies of the future. I believe these two initiatives are a powerful combination, and example of the federal Labor government’s commitment to education, access and strengthening the Australian economy.

As with anything new, there will certainly be challenges and hopefully by engaging online in discussions relating to public policy, we will be able to respond quicker and more efficiently to changing times. I urge you all to keep your heads up in these difficult economic times: to use, create and innovate with technology to help yourselves, help your businesses, and to help make Australia a world leader in the global information economy and beyond. It is those countries which continue this innovation and transformation through the recession that will emerge to shine in the economic recovery.

I am optimistic that under a Federal Labor Government, we will emerge from the recession stronger economically as a result of these investments, and through the work being done to open government up to its citizens we will emerge stronger democratically and socially as well.

Thank you.

Tagged: broadband, DER, digital economy, green ICT, ICT, industry, NBN