Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions
Good evening and welcome everyone.
It is my pleasure to be here to officially launch Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions.
This is a landmark event as we chart Australia's digital future.
The digital economy is essential to Australia's productivity, global competitive standing and improved social wellbeing.
It is the computers, the phones, our TVs, the networks and the banking systems that we use in our personal life and our business each day.
Increasingly, it is smart technology.
It is technology like sensor networks that can be built into bridges, deployed on farms or installed into traffic systems to monitor our infrastructure and environment and make it work more efficiently.
The digital economy will ultimately encompass the entire economy and most, if not all, facets of our society.
Internet and broadband are increasingly commonplace in our day to day lives — and the Rudd Government is moving rapidly to improve accessibility and service with the National Broadband Network.
However, evidence suggests that we are not matching our international peers as well as we could in all aspects of our digital engagement.
For example, the latest comparative OECD data indicates that as at December 2008 Australia's rate of broadband take-up — as measured by the number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants — was 25.4.
This is behind the US (25.8), the United Kingdom (28.5), Canada (29) and South Korea (32).
In terms of price, Australia is ranked 3rd most expensive in the OECD when it comes to monthly broadband prices — more expensive< than the US, UK, Canada, Japan and South Korea.
There is also evidence that many homes and businesses in Australia cannot access high-speed broadband services currently.
A recent report by Access Economics on the economic impacts of high-speed broadband indicates that 62 per cent of the population currently do not have access to speeds of 12Mbps or more.
Another concerning statistic is that Australian business is a heavy user of the digital economy, but this is not automatically translating into full engagement with the digital economy.
ABS data shows that despite 87 per cent of Australian businesses using the internet in 2007–08, only 42 per cent had a web presence, and only 27 per cent took orders online.
This points to a need for strategic action to ensure that Australia leverages the benefits of the digital economy.
In formulating our nation's digital economy strategy, it is important to acknowledge the nature of the digital economy and which part of society is best placed to progress which elements.
Digital economies are highly dynamic and they are primarily market-based phenomena.
This means that the transformation of our economy and our society into a digital economy is appropriately market and community-led.
The Australian Government's primary role in developing the digital economy is that of an enabler.
Government should enable individuals, households and businesses to take up the opportunities raised by the digital economy.
Recognising the importance of the digital economy, the Rudd Government has made a number of key commitments.
Central among them, of course, is the National Broadband Network. As you know,the Government has established a new company to invest with the private sector to deliver enhanced broadband to every Australian home, workplace and school.
As Prime Minister Rudd said when he and I unveiled this commitment in April 2009, the NBN will build:
“a 21st century economy with 21st century jobs... [it]…will revolutionise teaching in our classrooms,…revolutionise health care in our medical centres and our hospitals…[and] …will plug our nation into the global economy and help us overcome the tyranny of distance.”
Other key Government initiatives that will grow Australia's digital economy engagement are:
- The Digital Education Revolution: a $2 billion, five-year commitment to build Australia's digital media literacy amongst schoolchildren.
- Enterprise Connect: providing business advisory services to small and medium enterprises to help increase their productivity.
- Small Business Online: promoting the benefits of the digital economy to Australian SMEs, helping them take advantage of e-business opportunities and to expand their online presence.
- Government Innovation: we recently established an independent Government 2.0 Taskforce to advise on a range of issues that relate to the emerging agenda of online engagement.
- Smart Technology: to demonstrate the ability of technology to make our existing energy infrastructure smarter, the Government will invest $100 million in the National Energy Efficiency Initiative.
These are serious enabling commitments.
With these types of programs in place it then turns to industry and the community to take the lead to drive the full potential of Australia's digital economy.
Recognising the broad contribution required from industry and our community, this paper has been developed in close collaboration with industry and other stakeholders — many of whom are here this evening.
In August and September last year, we hosted a series of workshops and a forum inviting industry to identify where we wanted Australia's digital economy to be in 2013.
We also asked what we need to do to get there.
In December last year, we hosted a blog and explored the themes raised through the workshops and forum with the public.
In early 2009, we sought comments on a consultation draft of the paper that sought more specific details about each of the themes identified through the workshops and the forum.
I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to participate in the consultations and contributed ideas, suggestions and time.
This has all been invaluable assistance in identifying the key areas of focus for this report.
I sincerely hope the collaboration between government, industry and the public that has occurred to date on this topic will continue as we advance the discussion about Australia's digital economy.
It is important that this discussion occurs in as many parts of the country and as many fora as possible.
This cannot and should not be a debate within and amongst discrete industry sectors.
The digital economy is our economy.
It is our society.
Our digital engagement and debate must reflect that.
As the paper indicates, the key elements of success for Australia's digital economy are:
- Firstly, a digitally aware and enabling government.
- This is a government that lays the foundations for world-class digital infrastructure, that facilitates innovation and sets a conducive regulatory framework.
- Secondly, a digitally-confident and innovative industry.
- This includes the tech industry that is the engine room, if you will, in which to build our digital skills and grow our digital capabilities. It includes the broader industry that will adopt smart technology and develop sustainable online content models.
- Thirdly, a digitally-empowered and literate community.
- This is a community with strong digital confidence and digital media literacy.
It is a community that enjoys inclusive digital participation and benefits through online engagement.
Often technology and terms such as 'digital economy' may be considered to be the provenance of a select group of 'digerati'… not the stuff of the wider community.
In an effort to make the digital economy readily comprehensible, the report that I am launching this evening includes 12 case studies.
These case studies provide insight into the stories of Australians who have successfully embraced the digital economy and benefited from it.
We are lucky to have some of our case study participants represented here as speakers or participants in the mini-tech fair that greeted you on your arrival.
I encourage you all to read these case studies and to enjoy the demonstrations showcased outside this theatre.
These provide practical and very tangible demonstrations of what we are trying to achieve through this paper and our future work.
Finally, it did not escape our attention that there is a certain irony in releasing a Government report on the digital economy.
Government reports tend to be static, a point fixed in time.
The digital economy is the opposite of this.
It is a fast-paced, evolving and dynamic network of technology, business models and social practices.
In our own small way, we have attempted to put the digital in our national digital economy strategy.
We have attempted to abide by the recommendation in the report that the Government should be a leading digital economy participant.
We have sought to make the report more reflective of the digital economy it discusses by giving you the option of taking it home on a USB stick this evening.
We are also publishing it online on our Department's website in multiple formats so that you can read it in the format of your choice.
For those who use assistive technology, you can select the format that works best with your particular technology.
The online version will also include a tag cloud so that you can see the key themes and drill down into those areas that interest you.
It also includes social bookmarking tags so that you can share your favourite part of the report within your social networks.
Additionally, in keeping with the discussion in the report about increasing access to public sector information, we have published the report under a Creative Commons license.
I realise that these may not be significant steps for many of you in industry and the wider community for whom these features are commonplace.
However, these are relatively novel features for publishing an Australian Government report and I hope you will appreciate them in the spirit with which they are intended.
The Australian Government is committed to advancing the digital economy in Australia and we join with you in contributing to our digital future.
I look forward to working with each of you on this exciting journey.
