As politicians squabble about the proposed National Broadband Network, JOHN HARRIS looks at Australia's track record of using technology to overcome the tyranny of distance.

Flynn’s vision was fuelled by his desire to better serve pioneers living in remote areas where just two doctors covered an area of almost two million square kilometres.

Now called the Royal Flying Doctor Service, these airborne medics care for more than quarter of a million patients each year with pilots flying the equivalent of 25 round trips to the moon!

Backed by fundraising, donations and the public purse, the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a world-class solution to a problem of “market failure”– the inability of a free market to efficiently allocate goods and services to meet societal needs.

In 1928, the outback market for medical services was able to support two doctors per two million kilometres - until the Reverend Flynn’s airborne “market intervention”.

I started thinking about how Australia has used technology to overcome the tyranny of distance when I visited Marree, a northern outback town where the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks meet.

After a couple of days without email while travelling from Coober Pedy, via William Creek, I got jittery when I discovered that not only did my iPhone not get any 3G coverage in Marree – it couldn’t even make phone calls!

Fortunately, a bit of Federal Government “market intervention” from the year 2000 saved my bacon, in the form of the Outback Telecentre, set up with Networking the Nation funding as social infrastructure to address declining services in the rural town.

As well as training people and an information centre, the Marree Telecentre offers broadband for just $6 an hour.
Even residents of outlying stations increasingly depend on Internet access to run their farming businesses – with government-subsidised satellite broadband solving another market failure.

The Federal Government’s plan to spend as much as $43 billion on a fibre-optic network connecting millions of Australian homes and premises is a rolled gold market intervention.

While questions should be asked about whether the NBN is worth that amount of money, this country has plenty of problems that a future-proof communications network may help to solve.

Regional depopulation, with the consequent degradation of educational, medical and other social and commercial services, is inversely matched by the congested streets, housing shortages and service shortfalls of overcrowded metropolitan cities, with their huge environmental impact.

The NBN is proposed as a high-speed, highly-redundant communication network that will deliver services electronically to and from every significant population centre in the country.

If it can help to repopulate rural areas by bringing country towns online and delivering jobs down the glass fibre, the NBN will pay for itself way beyond the standard parameters of a corporate profit and loss report.

While Marree’s population of less than 100 means it may never see a fibreoptic network, the NBN’s wireless outreach even promises better broadband for this tiny outback town.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. Email jharris@impress.com.au.

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