March 2004 updates

Future-proofing Australian ICTs
By Lelia Green in Mount Lawley, Australia. March 2004

Australia is abuzz with the developing concept of future-proofing. This originally started out as an idea associated with the information economy and the development of life-long learners. Here the concept was that children (and adults) could be "future proofed" if they could be educated to be active learners who consistently 'scanned' their social and political environments to learn new skills and anticipate the future. Such people, it was argued, would embrace change. This would mean that they could make the most of future developments and would be inoculated against the future.

This concept, loosely related to the education and training of new generations of information workers, is now being applied to technology and processes for ensuring that technology is kept up to date.

The debate erupted when the Australian government began a dialogue that it hopes will end with the full sale of the once-monopoly Telstra (previously Telecom Australia) on the private share markets. Up until 1997 the government wholly owned Telstra, but over the years 49.9 percent has been sold to investors.

Australians in remote and rural areas persuaded the government not to sell more of the telecommunications giant until the digital divide between city and country became lessened. Once that process was underway a new concern arose: how could the technological infrastructure of the bush be future-proofed?

The Australian government had addressed the previous divide with high profile inquiries into the differences between city and country telecommunications services. The Besley inquiry ("Connecting Australia") reported in September 2000 and documented a range of problems which the government promised to address through policy, legislation and through grants made available from the part-sale of Telstra.

The Estens inquiry ("Connecting Regional Australia") was to see if the problems identified by Besley had been solved. The report was delivered in September 2002, and contained 39 recommendations. In June 2003 the Australian government promised to address all the recommendations and declared that its undertaking to bridge the divide between city and country had been kept. Since then there has been a continuing argument about future proofing.

The concern is that the divide might have been bridged for the moment, but it will soon re-open. (This is not to deny that many people in remote areas remain concerned about inferior communications services and large price differentials.) The government's response has been to announce that the country's telecommunications infrastructure will be future proofed by a series of rolling inquiries along the lines of Besley and Estens, coupled with a commitment to implement the recommendations and to require telecommunications operators to maintain and upgrade services as a condition of their operating licences. This commitment has been bankrolled to date by the proceeds of seeling shares in Telstra -- many people wonder whether this will still be the case without the incentive of a government cash windfall.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting idea that processes can be put in place to future proof developments in ICTs and their supporting infrastructure. Nowadays, the concern is no longer one simply of bridging the digital divide, or instituting minimum service provisions, but instead the idea is one of future proofing: setting in place procedures to ensure that the divide does not reopen. Time will tell whether such procedures work in practice.