AIIA on NBN, collaboration, Australia as ICT leader

13.01.2010

There's very recent research around what's happening in the States, and first what happened in the Obama campaign. Obama came from nowhere to become president of the United States. One of the major reasons he was able to do that was because he built an Internet platform of support and following and fundraising. He 'electronofied' if you like, his campaign and showed the new way of using the information in the economy, so to speak, and that's a real landing place. What's happened now is a whole group of people in the United States who are not enamoured with the Obama administration are now starting to mobilise themselves through the Internet. There are groups that are connecting through the Internet to half a million voters, and there was a recent congressional election in one of the states, between republican and democratic candidates. This group put up a third independent candidate, they voted for that independent candidate, split the votes, and it went from being a republican to a democratic seat. So there's a direct connection now between the use of technology and the ability of technology to create a social platform that can change votes.

So, what we need to now be doing as a country, and politicians need to be doing, is to understand this direct connection, because if they do then they start to understand the value of ICT and they understand that it starts to connect directly to the wealth of their citizens. It's quite a dynamic change that's occurring and it's going to have to be time when the politicians do directly connect that, and I'm not trying to be overly critical of them at the moment because they're much better than they have been but there's still that broad connection.

One of the major themes that has come from the conversations we've had is how critical collaboration is. Collaboration across economies, but also collaboration within our economy to achieve the kind of outcomes we need to achieve so that the layers of government, state, federal, local that we have in Australia, in some ways that can be an impedance to achieving some of the "jump-forward" outcomes that are being achieved in other countries. Obviously other countries make a single decision to invest in a particular area; when the Philippines for example has gone from virtually nowhere to $6 billion in outsourcing business in 10 years. They made a decision that they were going to be a leader in the outsourcing business, and they are!

They are! $6 billion business employing 400,000 people; it's an amazing story.

So it's hard for some businesses in Australia to really emulate that kind of decision making because of the different levels. So collaboration is really important, and collaboration between state and federal, which is improving, and which is probably as best as it has been for many years, is really going to be critical to address a lot of these issues. John heads up the innovation council for [Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research] Kim Carr, the IT Industry Innovation Council, which is a great thing. Good because it's got a focus on innovation but also good because you're bringing together the states and the federal people and industry people around a common agenda and we need more of that to achieve the outcomes we want to get to.