Internet use widens social gap in Australia - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Internet use widens social gap in Australia

October 13, 2000
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Internet-use-widens-social-gap-in-Australia-/0,139023165,120105564,00.htm

Internet usage in Australia has created a digital divide between online haves and have-nots, threatening to widen the gap between social classes, a new study released on Thursday showed.

Australia is one of the world's most wired countries, with an estimated 43 percent of its 13.5 million adults using the Internet in the year to February -- just behind Norway, the United States, Iceland and Sweden.

But a report by the Australian Council of Social Services, the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, and the Communications Law Centre (CLC), found despite the high Internet take-up rate, poorer, less educated Australians were not online.

"There is a digital divide in Australia with the key factors education, level of income, age and the presence of children in a household," CLC director Jock Given told a news conference.

"If you are unable to participate in ... activities (on the Internet), there is a broadly held concern that this will be increasingly significant from the view point of social and economic opportunity."

The report's finding that income and social situation, not geography, determined which side of the digital divide you were on - mirroring similar studies in the United States and Britain - made the government's concern with supply to rural areas secondary.

Australia's conservative coalition government is actively pursuing programmes to ensure rural and regional areas have the infrastructure to access the latest technology but the report said Internet usage had little link with where people lived.

"These kinds of measures will not be enough to bridge the digital divide. Low-income earners, the unemployed and the elderly have not even connected to the net," Given said.

"If you are poor or lack good education it is not going to make much difference how many satellites we put in the sky or how many cables we run past your house.

A broader and more complex social policy agenda is going to be necessary if Australia is to seriously address the root causes of its digital divide."

The report, titled Sociodemographic Barriers to Telecommunications Use, found people earning AU$84,000 (US$48,006) a year or more were 3.2 times more likely to have Internet access than those earning less than AU$22,000.