Budget: Few crumbs for ICT industry

commentary As a media representative, my inbox is regularly graced with announcements from Senator Helen Coonan, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

As she is the point man, er woman, on all telecoms-related government matters, these releases are a good indicator of the government's priorities. They also show Coonan isn't above a bit of good old-fashioned Opposition-bashing: during the six weeks from mid-March, no fewer than seven Labor-blasting press releases were issued.

Riveting headlines like "Labor's broadband dreaming", "One million and counting -- Labor's attacks fall flat", "Same old Labor: Nothing new in Mr Rudd's broadband proposal", "Labor ducks the broadband challenge" and "Analysts 'bell the cat' on Labor's broadband proposal" give you an idea of the tenor of these groundbreaking news announcements.

I was, therefore, quite eagerly awaiting the groundbreaking telecoms-related news announcements that would undoubtedly accompany the latest Howard-Costello budget. And while I should have known better, I confess to a bit of surprise to have trolled through the budget highlights for ICT related announcements -- and come up with absolutely zilch.

Well, not "zilch" exactly. The government has committed AU$13.6 million -- just a tad over one-quarter the AU$50 million earmarked for redeveloping grandstands at the Sydney Cricket Ground and Adelaide Oval -- over four years "to help protect Australians from sophisticated online attacks targeting home and small business computers". That's AU$3.4 million per year, or approximately 72 cents per year for each of 4.7 million households that the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us currently have Internet access.

Seventy-two cents. That's not enough to buy a Kit Kat for lunch, much less to protect your average punter against the billions of malicious e-mails circulating the globe as you read this.

Honestly, what kind of help can that provide? Perhaps the best way for the only way this money could effectively reach so many Australian households would be for Coonan's gang to develop one clearly worded guide to online safety -- then spam it to every known Australian e-mail address. At current rates for broadband data, that might just come in on budget.

This is a great example of how seemingly large amounts of budget funding means squat when amortised across the constituents it's expected to help.

I imagine primary producers are doing similar maths -- and holding heads in hands -- when dissecting the AU$24.6 million the government has earmarked for agricultural assistance.

But I digress.

Where is the strategy?
It is of significant interest that the platform upon which Coonan could have announced major telecoms-related investment -- her post-Budget press release -- is completely devoid of any new funding to support the supposed priority to broadband enable Australia.

After all, with so many bad things to say about Labor's policies I assumed she had a much better strategy waiting in the wings. Surely, with Howard and Costello throwing around cash like sailors on weekend leave in Kings Cross, she could have grabbed some to fund radical new infrastructure policies?

Instead, Coonan has co-issued the release with Senator George Brandis, Minister for the Arts and Sport, whose presence I can only attribute to Coonan's desire to obscure the paucity of initiatives related to her own portfolio. Of 13 bullet-pointed funding announcements, six (totalling AU$289.6 million) pertain to the arts community, five (AU$186.64 million) are sports related, and just two (totalling AU$30 million) are ICT related -- and both have questionable relevance.

The body of the release reflects this, with the majority trumpeting the merits of the new AU$282.9 million plan to support Australian film making.

Now, I love movies as much as the next person, and I appreciate the financial benefits that can come from kissing the collective a*** of American movie directors so they bring their projects down here. However, it is disappointing that this cash-rich budget -- which includes an unprecedented range of handouts and funds sports initiatives at six times the rate of ICT -- has simply side-stepped the issue.

Admittedly, there's an additional AU$16.3 million to fund the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) -- presumably to help offset the cost of paying some boutique PR company to convince Australians that our current telecoms environment is really, really great.

Coonan clearly believes current policies -- and the paltry sums coming from the government to support critical broadband infrastructure -- are more than adequate for the market's needs. Now, to be fair, I wouldn't call the coming AU$600 million Broadband Connect handouts 'paltry', but once they're gone, they're, well, gone.

The government, having milked as much as it could from its holdings in Telstra, has cut the industry loose and is leaving infrastructure development to the whimsy of a fragmented and chronically imbalanced market.

Where is the vision? What long-term investment is the government making to improve communications for all Australians? And I don't mean buying votes with great wads of cash that will more likely be used towards new plasma TVs than the training or childcare it was meant for.

Labor has positioned its multi-billion dollar broadband strategy as a major election initiative, and the Coalition has wasted no time in mocking it. But to keep up with the rest of the world's ICT, this country needs a coherent strategy, a cashed-up and empowered regulator, and a government that will stop blowing chances to even symbolically portray better telecommunications infrastructure as a national priority.