A native of Fremantle and a staunch defender of social justice, Senator Grieg became the Democrats' spokesperson on IT issues in 2000, when Senator Natasha Stott Despoja took the helm of the party.
Despite having trouble being heard above the din of the major parties, the Australian Democrats have shown unequivocal support for local IT industry, tax breaks for R&D investment, and IT education at all levels dating back to the 1999 release of the party's vision statement for the IT sector.
Unencumbered by an ideological commitment to liberalised trade, Greig's approach is one which provides broad legislative support to the Australian ITC sector, however critics may be concerned about the mechanics behind the senator's proposals.
- Would you support further privatisation of Telstra? How will you promote the rollout and uptake of broadband services in Australia?
The Democrats do not support further privatisation of Telstra. With regards to the rollout and uptake of broadband services The Democrats position:
- The Commonwealth must set targets in consultation with ICT sector;
- Telstra to have core responsibility but commercial carriers to contribute to investment along partial market share lines - they will have the option of sub-contracting back to Telstra.
- Establish monopoly zones in rural, remote and regional areas where competition is not sustainable (ACCC to have oversight) and cross-subsidise to ensure geography does not entrench digital divide.
- Prioritise regional communities with university and TAFE campuses.
The Democrats' commitment to the knowledge economy is focused on developing the long-term productive and creative capacities of Australians through significant re-investment in education and research at all levels. We see under-developed productive capacity in ICT as the fundamental constraint, not access to high bandwidth in isolation.
Roll out of high bandwidth capability without significant investment in developing a strong local ICT productive capacity will only entrench asymmetry and lock-in Australia as an ICT consumer (moreover, broadband content will foster demand to drive roll-out).
Of course, we need to do both. But we think the priority must be on developing Australia's productive and creative capacity.
- What steps will you take to improve telecommunications access in rural and regional Australia? Since people in low-income urban areas have been identified by recent studies as those most at risk of becoming a technologically illiterate underclass, what steps will you take to improve their access to technology?
We believe our stance on Broadband will improve Internet and telecommunications access in rural areas.
Information technologies are ubiquitous throughout our social, cultural and economic domains. Thus, the ability to use computers and manage digital information is a crucial enabling condition for success in education, employment and social interaction.
Access to quality education - including adult education - is the key to over-coming digital divides
In addition, the Democrats place a high priority in resourcing the network of public and education sector libraries, which provide a wide range of Internet services. We believe they constitute a vital democratic and educational infrastructure. They are crucial to support the fundamental right of all Australians to freely engage with ideas and information in the public domain.
- What will you do to support and promote the uptake of distance education? How will you encourage the everyday use of IT in primary and secondary education?
Australia has both a very long history and a high degree of expertise in the delivery of distance education particularly for rural and remote Australians. However, we take it your question goes to support for on-line delivery, which is not the same thing.
The Democrats believe on-line delivery and multi-modal course delivery is an important and stimulating complement to high quality, face-to-face teaching in a well resourced public education system.
On-line education is expensive and we support increased investment to assist schools, TAFEs and universities develop on-line course materials and considerable investment in professional development of teachers for all education sectors.
We believe on-line delivery will have the greatest applicability in vocational and professional education.
The Democrats believe the opposition's proposed University of Australia On-line is naïve and ill considered. It explicitly rules out the very cohort who are best placed to benefit from and use learner-driven, on-line education: postgraduates.
The Democrats support the implementation of a strong national accreditation and quality assurance framework and will require that such a framework cover borderless education.
Hype about information rarely acknowledges that managing information intelligently is more important than ever in an online environment.
Australia will not become a knowledge society by mere information saturation. There is a vital need for educational programs at all level, to equip students with the ability to locate, retrieve, discriminate, appraise, and apply information in a plethora of uncertain, rapidly changing and complex contexts.
While all Australians need the opportunities to develop information literacy, it is a mistake to conflate the basic skills of computer literacy with the tasks of managing information in a purposeful and generative way.
Accordingly, the Democrats priorities for use of IT in education are;
- systematic professional development of teachers;
- development of curricula that gives students the capacity to creatively organise information; and
- significant re-investing in libraries and librarians who have very high levels of competence in managing information.
We see these 'human capital' priorities as being of greater importance than simply the provision of Internet infrastructure to schools.
- Do you support the Australian Broadcasting Authority's regulation of Internet content? Is the cost of the scheme justified given its effect thus far?
The Internet is an indiscriminate medium - that is one of its intrinsically democratic characteristics. It is also one of the reasons why this Government's knee-jerk attempts to control or ban access are so misguided. The Democrats believe the emphasis must be on education to promote responsible Internet use; we remain opposed to applying constraints on the free flow of information and ideas.
- What steps will you take to combat the so-called IT brain drain, and to encourage young educated Australians to remain in Australia?
We do not dispute there is a shortage of skilled IT professionals in some - but not necessarily all - areas of IT. The evidence for either 'brain drain' or 'brain gain' is not conclusive due to lack of fine-grained qualitative analysis (i.e. immigration data cannot distinguish between a gun PhD researcher and a competent, but perhaps not devastatingly creative, data entry worker).
The 'brain drain' - 'brain shortage' is a multi-faceted problem. Key elements of the Democrats' priorities to overcome shortages are:
- Re-investment in our universities so they can attract and retain high caliber teaching and research staff;
- Changing funding models in higher education (including TAFE) and research to reward co-operation so as to enhance building critical mass in areas of ICT opportunity;
- Provision of more attractive PhD scholarships - including increasing the number and value of scholarships to attract international students (AusAid scholarships to research students in general have fallen from 1600 in 1995 to 600 in 2000);
- Greater incentives to attract venture capital for ICT start-ups;
- Expansion of CRC programs in ICT; and
- All Government ICT outsourcing to be offered in 'tenderable' chunks for local ICT SMEs.
- Do you believe employees' rights are upheld by recently enacted privacy legislation? Will you support a limitation on electronic surveillance in the workplace?
The Australian Democrats do not believe employees rights have been upheld either adequately or consistently by recent privacy legislation, a matter which we address in a following question. The party also supports a limitation on electronic surveillance in the workplace.
- What will you do to curb the blow out in Australia's ITC trade deficit, which has grown to $17.73 billion -- triple what it was in 1990-91?
This is the crucial challenge. There are no short-term solutions. Generating and developing our human capital is fundamental thus substantial re-investment in all education and training sectors and the systematic professional development of teachers is essential.
If Australia is to become truly knowledge and learning-driven, we must fully grasp that powerful knowledge, while drawing constantly on information and practical information skills, relies on creative thinking and the life of the imagination.
The Government's response to the innovation debate - Backing Australia's Ability - focused on applied science and engineering and commercializing scientific breakthroughs. The Democrats certainly support increased investment in science and engineering and rapid Australian commercialization of Australian IP.
However, this 'official' version of innovation is a radically incomplete picture because it takes for granted the creativity that recognizes opportunities and produces the IP in the first place. Effectively, it is an approach that reduces innovation to producing short and medium term commercial monopolies.
Moreover, while applied science and engineering are vital for intellectual and economic growth, their primary focus is already-identified problems.
Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."
It is a perceptive comment. The Democrats are committed to deepening productive creativity throughout all sectors: to ask the right questions.
This is particularly the case in the 'creative industries'. The Democrats recognize these as a dynamic and growing part of the economy, especially, but not limited to, the development of ICT applications and the emergence of new areas at the intersection of ICT and other sectors.
According to John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy, worldwide creative endeavours are now worth $2.2 trillion and growing at five percent per annum, and in some countries much faster. In Australia, growth of the 'arts economy' has moved ahead of growth in general and is greater than 10% in some areas.
We believe the worlds' most successful knowledge-based economies will be the most creative economies, where cultural pursuits are most fully integrated into all domains of social and economic life.
The GDPs of the world's leading industrial nations already reflect this, with productivity relating less to physical goods but more to abstract goods and services, including entertainment, applications and 'content'.
This means design and the arts - particularly in multi-media contexts - need greater support and prominence in our education and research institutions and the extension of tax concessions and incentives such as is offered to film to develop strong local capabilities in creative applications.
It is of great concern that the relevant infrastructure, which mostly comes from the arts, humanities and social sciences in our universities, is the worst affected by Government cutbacks.
However, it is not just general cutbacks that are the issue. We need to significantly change how we value and define creativity in our funding and tax policies. These are still anchored in out-moded models of what is knowledge.
The R&D tax concession is a good case in point of an out-of-date understanding of the knowledge economy. When it was introduced in 1986, the Australian concession was regarded, along with the Canadian incentives, to be the best in the world, but now it ranks down near the bottom. More to the point, it was formulated with a strong engineering and manufacturing perspective. Research in the arts, humanities and social sciences, for instance, is explicitly ruled ineligible.
While it was initially successful at increasing business investment in R&D, uptake was largely confined to older manufacturing and mining sectors.
This year, the Government introduced a Bill to further narrow the scope of the definition of R&D, which would have had disastrous consequences for R&D in ICT. As it happened, the Democrats had a significant legislative win and forced the Government to accept a raft of amendments that defeated the proposed definitional changes to the R&D concession, enhanced eligibility for SMEs and ensured compliance for R&D plans was 'scaleable' for size and complexity of project and size of company.
However, despite our improvements, the concession still pre-supposes a narrow conception of industry and the 'one-size-fits-all' approach is grossly insensitive to the very different modes and forms of R&D activities in ICT and the emerging 'creative industries'.
Similarly, most research outputs from the creative industries do not count in DETYA publications categories for allocating competitive research funds to universities.
- Will you use government procurement to bolster Australian IT companies?
Yes
- How do you propose to stimulate ITC R&D in Australia? How will you encourage the availability of post-secondary IT training and education?
In regards to the stimulation of ITC R&D the Australian Democrats propose the following measures:
- Increased funding for universities, CSIRO, CRC's, pre-seed programs, ARC and DSTO;
- ensure design, arts and other 'creative industries' disciplines receive greater support and prominence in our education and research institutions;
- Change DETYA categories of research outputs in competitive funding models to better reflect the different modes of research in ICT;
- Greater emphasis on co-operation in funding models to enhance development of critical mass in key ICT areas - we must encourage an ethos of local co-operation for global competition;
- Lift tax concession to 150% with incremental incentive of 200% for R&D labor spend;
- Develop more fine-grained R&D concessions to ensure different modes of creativity are not excluded from support;
- Extend and simplify R&D Start and other grants schemes for business;
- Extend tax concessions and incentives, such as is offered to film, to develop strong local production in creative applications and 'content' development (much 'content' already qualifies); and
- Allow parallel importation of computer software in conjunction (and only in conjunction) with strengthening anti-piracy provisions.
The Australian Democrats also intend to promote post-secondary IT training and education through:
- The Abolishion of differential HECS for science, maths, computing and engineering.
- Increase in operating grants to universities and TAFEs. Defunding is the real problem for attracting and retaining high quality ICT teaching and research staff, not, as some ICT industry people have claimed, restrictive industrial agreements. Enterprise agreements are seriously problematic for essentially public sector institutions such as universities because they cannot generate profits for many of their core non-market tasks in the way business can. It is important to note there is no constraint on over awards and in fact many ICT academics do, in fact, get significant over-award payments. However, while universities remain chronically under-funded their capacity to offer competitive remuneration is seriously constrained;
- Increase research scholarships for domestic and international students;
- Reverse the instrumentalisation of TAFE, which has been reduced to an arm of the Coalition's employment policy with over-emphasis on short-term training at the expense of education. Specifically, TAFE to be funded to provide good e-skills in an educational, rather than narrow vocational, context; and
- Change the current tax regime whereby self-education expenses can only be claimed if the course is directly related to assessable income. This regime does not take into account the increasing mobility and flexibility of modern labor markets and is a disincentive for people to invest in their own life-long learning.
The Democrats do not support proposals for a voucher system, as they are a poor instrument for achieving long-term goals.
- How will you approach datacasting legislation given the Government's failed spectrum auction in May 2001?
The Australian Democrats broadcasting and media policy is based on the principles of: diversity of ownership and control of the major media outlets in Australia; and encouragement of innovation and accessibility in the new environment of convergence.
Until new players in the broadcasting industry are significant enough to be able to afford to lease spectrum and to put forward free-to-air networks, it is probable that any new free-to-air network would be owned and controlled by one of the more significant existing media owners, if cross-media rules were abolished. If this were the case, and if it led to an existing free-to-air network going off the air, that would diminish the number of media owners in Australia. The Democrats are not in favor of diminishing the number of media owners in Australia.
Within the framework of increased ownership and control of major media outlets, and encouragement of innovation and accessibility, the Democrats agree that spectrum should be allocated in a way, which maximizes the availability of channels for existing and new services. We would also be in favor of a method of allocating broadcast spectrum to new service providers, which would not make that spectrum prohibitively expensive to new, smaller providers.
Greens policies underrated.
I think the Greens' policies are very fair, and provide good solutions to providing fair telephone and internet access to all Australians.
Their policies also address the errors made by Richard Alston on censorship and digital broadcasting.
I was disappointed that the Greens weren't listed in your poll.
The Greens have full policy information at
<URL:http://www.greens.org.au/>.