Colin

Internet filtering - a waste of resources for all the reasons others in this blog have mentioned. Stephen Covey and his Principled Centred Leadership needs to come to the fore. You do not, nor can you solve social problems with technology. Technology is always an enabling tool, but implemented from flawed principles it becomes an unproductive and crippling mechanism that will harm more than it protects.

Digital Economy - no such thing in my book. We have the economy, and you have people that form communities that influence the economy with a range of mechanisms and tools, and one such tool happens to be electronic communications pipes and systems that data and knowledge get transferred by at increasing speeds.

If Australia is to become the nation built on knowledge then it needs a digital network that in order of importance is: - reliable
- accessible
- fast
- publically owned

This network then needs to be available to enterprises who pay the same price to access it who then build value adding services such as online business applications, entertainment offerings, education etc. It is pointless having a national network that is also owned by a service provider who does not equitably wholesale price access to that network.

The free market economy and the greed of corporations makes such a model unworkable. The priority will always be to the shareholders and the share price. With public ownership of the network this problem disappears.

Of course, the government must not get in its mind that a national broadband network once implemented is "mission accomplished". The network will require continual upgrading and maintenance, and no doubt yet to be invented technologies will supplant current ideas of what a national network should be capable of achieving.