This chapter reflects on the implications for nation-building of Australia’s centrally-controlled federal broadband policy, and its long history of government-controlled, one-size-fits-all infrastructure solutions. Drawing on early qualitative findings from a series of interviews with telecommunications industry elites conducted in Canada and Australia during 2006 and 2007, this chapter posits that Australia’s nation-building future rests on a reinvigoration of federalism to enable local and regional communications solutions to address local and regional communications problems. The reasons for this are twofold. First, research on the social uses of broadband technologies indicates that improving the infrastructure is not, as some would believe, about providing entertainment or solving a digital divide issue which may not justify significant public expenditure — it is ‘a social network and productivity issue … [and] an investment in social capital’ (CEDA 2006: 22) which is necessary if Australia is to maintain its current standard of living. Traditional social networks exist physically at the local and regional levels, while broadband technologies enable digital social networks which extend beyond geographical bounds, providing numerous social and economic benefits. In this social environment, broadband technologies require physical infrastructure which is necessarily situated amidst the local as established by geography and the needs of the citizen. Thus local issues are important if the broader ‘digital’ needs of citizens are to be met. After all, it will be difficult for governments to justify public expenditure on a broadband network which does not meet the needs of its citizens as users (this concept is explored by Coleman & Skogstad 1990; Coleman 2007).

Second, where social capital is defined as the ‘social norms, networks and trust that facilitate cooperation within or between groups… [which] can generate benefits to society by reducing transaction costs, promoting cooperative behaviour, diffusing knowledge and innovations, and through enhancements to personal well-being and associated spill-overs’ (Productivity Commission 2003: viii), a single national solution may be regarded as paternalistic in circumstances where citizens as users are not involved in the decision-making process.^[1] Given the specific knowledge requirements for citizens as users to be gainfully involved in communications policy processes, paternalistic solutions tend to detract from social capital rather than create it. Where the citizen as user is excluded from decision-making processes due to a lack of policy experience, they are subsequently excluded from gaining skills to participate effectively in future policy processes. The nation-building project may be largely finished in terms of large-scale infrastructure projects (Butcher 2007), but the future of nation-building in the global information economy is one of increasing social capital by establishing communications networks which are accessible and deliver the services which citizens as users need and can afford. Increasing social capital in this environment requires citizen engagement — a requirement that is likely to become more important as technology provides citizens with greater access to information and interactive media.

The key argument developed in this paper is that contemporary nation-building requires citizen participation and strategically-focused policies which facilitate citizen engagement and federal systems are well-placed to enable such approaches. Various commentators have indicated that if Australia is to maintain its current standard of living, high speed broadband is a necessity (Smarr cited in Hartcher 2007). However, evidence of the advantages of public investment in broadband infrastructure remains incomplete (Crowe 2007a) or lacks empirical rigour (see for example Bell Canada Enterprises 2006; Business Council of Australia (BCA) 2008a; Crandall et al. 2007; Douglas 2007; Foreshaw 2006). Moreover, academic challenges to the status quo (the single national solution) in Australia continue to be regarded as ‘left-field’ (Sainsbury 2006). To shine some light on the ‘left-field’ debate, two approaches to broadband infrastructure deployment in two most-similar federal jurisdictions are compared from a nation-building perspective in Canada and Australia. The following sections focus on the Australian way of ‘doing’ communications policy, the influence of history on nation-building, and the persistence of the single national policy solution in the broadband era.