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Australia draws line under anti-China hysteria. Will it be enough to unfreeze relations?

By BOB CARR | 13 August 2018

This week Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reset the Australia-China relationship – ditching 12 months in which Australia had become the most rhetorically adversarial towards China of all of the United States’ allies and partners.

Turnbull was always going to do it. It was a matter of language and timing. Fears his government has allowed to spread about Chinese money in Australia’s democracy and China’s growing influence in the region had little substance, and have done Australia more harm than good.

Continue reading “Australia draws line under anti-China hysteria. Will it be enough to unfreeze relations?”

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Ending trickle down economics

By EMMA DAWSON | 19 July 2018

John Kenneth Galbraith once described trickle-down economics as the theory that “if you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows”.

In Australia today, as in so many other developed nations where trickle-down economics has been ascendant for the last three decades, the horses have grown very fat, and the sparrows are starving.

Continue reading “Ending trickle down economics”

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auDA latest — all quiet on the western front (for now, at least)

By LAURIE PATTON | 3 July 2018

As I’ve written previously, the Australian Government has given auDA – the company managing our Internet domain names – three months to develop new processes to redress historical weaknesses in its governance. The organisation has been mired in controversy in recent years. For quite some time, though, it had been seen as a tightly held fiefdom under the control of a board of directors elected from within the industry and fraught with conflicts of interest.

auDA brought in a team of external facilitators to run a member consultation session. Only about a dozen people showed up in person and about the same number attended online. This suggests to me that claims of widespread disquiet among the auDA constituency might be a tad overblown. Continue reading “auDA latest — all quiet on the western front (for now, at least)”

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#NoAnonymousSledging — time to clean up the Internet?

By LAURIE PATTON | 23 June 2018

It’s time we did something about the ‘keyboard cowards’ – especially those who post false and/or defamatory comments on social media.

To fail to do so will open the Internet up to moves by governments to interfere in ways that have been successfully opposed since its inception, on the basis of arguments about free speech and freedom from undue state interference in people’s lives.

It’s a complex issue, but the laws that have traditionally protected people from damaging defamatory comments must be extended to the online world or they might as well not exist!

Continue reading “#NoAnonymousSledging — time to clean up the Internet?”

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Unpopulate or perish — revisiting the Whitlam decentralisation vision in a digital age

One day a rooster, the next day a feather duster!

By LAURIE PATTON | 5 December 2017

On the 45th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam Government let’s reflect on a forward-thinking policy that deserves revisiting for a digitally-enabled world – decentralisation.

It’s predicted that pretty soon 90 percent of all Australians will live in our capital cities. But does it makes sense for most of us to be jammed into a handful of increasingly overcrowded population centres? Continue reading “Unpopulate or perish — revisiting the Whitlam decentralisation vision in a digital age”

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Internet Australia continues to call out #NBNFail amid media attacks

By LAURIE PATTON | 9 August 2017

The years ago, Internet Australia, the NFP peak body representing internet users, embarked on a mission to foster more informed debate about the National Broadband Network and its importance to Australia’s future. It was – and is – the view of the board and members that we need something better than a network deploying ageing copper wires. Most technology journalists already agreed with that proposition.

However, some in the mainstream media took much longer to get the message. As one of my former colleagues from Channel Seven put it, the subject amounted to a lot of “white noise“.  Continue reading “Internet Australia continues to call out #NBNFail amid media attacks”

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The broadband debacle — NBN Co needs to eat its own dog food

By LAURIE PATTON | 9 August 2017

According to the Australian Financial Review, the company building the National Broadband Network is about to lease two extremely expensive offices — one in Melbourne and one in Sydney.

That’s rather old school thinking. NBN Co should be leading by example. One of the benefits of a digitally-enabled world is the ability to work remotely or to decentralise. Continue reading “The broadband debacle — NBN Co needs to eat its own dog food”

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NBN boss attacks Internet Australia under Parliamentary privilege

By LAURIE PATTON | 21 June 2017

Earlier in the year the head of the NBN Co, Bill Morrow, was appearing before a Senate Estimates hearing. Asked by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam about his organisation’s habit of blocking people who make unkind comments about his inferior broadband network on social media, Mr Morrow had the first of two ‘brain farts’ in which he gratuitously attacked Internet Australia.

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Generalists and specialists in the Australian public service. Why the ‘theory of empty spaces’ hurts public sector performance

By LAURIE PATTON | 19 April 2016

The other day I was talking to a friend who recently retired from the public service. After a career lifetime of studied discretion he now wears as a badge of honour his entitlement to express independent views. Many of these are critical of the processes that played a pivotal part in his rise to a very senior posting.

I have a number of colleagues who are now ex-public servants, having held extremely high level executive roles. I enjoy hearing about their work experiences more now that they are unencumbered by ambition. Continue reading “Generalists and specialists in the Australian public service. Why the ‘theory of empty spaces’ hurts public sector performance”

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Data retention — how not to introduce complex legislation

By LAURIE PATTON | 21 December 2015

One of my first tasks shortly after joining Internet Australia in 2014 was to front the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS). My appearance at the hearing into the (Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015) came at the end of a long day of mostly critical submissions.

With our president and the head of the policy committee sitting beside me I boldly told the committee that the Data Retention Bill was “fundamentally flawed” and had clearly been drafted by lawyers who didn’t understand how the Internet actually works. How prescient those comments have proven to have been.

Continue reading “Data retention — how not to introduce complex legislation”