If I were elected to office …

I’d build a high speed national broadband network. While it’s tempting to be cynical and think that a high speed network will just allow faster downloads of dancing cat videos from YouTube, I think the benefits in the long term will be far beyond what we can imagine now. Apart from anything else, when the world starts running out of oil and petrol hits ten, twenty, fifty dollars a litre, high quality teleconferencing/telecommuting will be a possibility on a high bandwidth network, whereas with our current infrastructure it’s not possible. With the geographic spread and low population of Australia the telcos will never build a decent broadband network beyond the high density urban centres – its an infrastructure project that the government needs to bring to fruition.

For data connectivity (and dancing cats), Vote 1, Me.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #68]