Historically, telegraphy was a major component of the nation-building projects in both Canada and Australia. The technology is significant today in that it ushered in the information age (Copp & Zanella 1993: 14; Livingston 1996: 6-7; Williams 2001: 15) and established a conceptual framework for policy-makers responding to modern communication challenges. While broadband technologies have surpassed the capabilities of the broadcasting and telecommunications technologies of the twentieth century, conceptual remnants from the initial stages of the information age tend to circumscribe policy choices for deploying contemporary broadband infrastructure in Australia (Gans 2006). At federation, the former Australian colonies readily agreed to the Commonwealth’s ownership and control of the national telecommunications network, enshrined principally in section 51 of the Australian Constitution. Conversely, Canada’s telecommunications industry developed in diverse, regionally-based markets consisting of a variety of private sector businesses and provincial and municipal government-owned enterprises. As telecommunications technologies converged with media and Internet-based technologies, the changing industry structures in both countries have led to quite different outcomes in high-speed broadband.

Canada embraced the plurality of its industry structure with federal policy focused on educating the diverse policy communities, aggregating demand in local and regional markets, and ‘forbearing’^[2] from regulatory interference in an effort to promote competition. Such policy choices resulted in Canada ranking fourth in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2007 in terms of broadband infrastructure access and speed of the services. On the other hand, Australia’s device-based industry structure,^[3] combined with its centrally-controlled communications policies, struggled to keep pace with converging technologies and effectively prevented local and regional interests from being heard in a debate dominated by the federal government, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Telstra, and professional lobbyists (Crowe 2007c; Lee 2007; Warne-Smith 2007). Local and regional interests were sidelined (Marris 2007; Sainsbury 2005) while a passionate debate over responsibility for the state of Australia’s broadband infrastructure and speeds, which rank well below the OECD average, raged publicly between Telstra, the Howard government and the ACCC (Crowe & Boyd 2005; Lee & Bajkowski 2007; The Australian 2007). During the 2008 federal election, Kevin Rudd announced the Labor Party’s intention — if elected — to massively extend the reach of broadband technology as an essential element in nation-building. Following Rudd’s election victory, ‘broadband’ has been elevated in status to a ministry^[4] however a single national solution continues to dominate the broadband policy discourse in Australia.

Research suggests that single, national broadband solutions do not ‘create a program delivery system that is cost-effective, easy to use and highly responsive to the needs of citizens’ (Information Technology Office 2005: 14). The increasing trend toward centralisation appears to be reinforcing ‘state paternalism’ which is at odds with the need to create ‘social capital’. To Kelly (Kelly 1992: 98), ‘state paternalism’ was an historical approach to policy-making in Australia which was ‘familiar and comfortable’ to organised interests. While many have critiqued Kelly’s concept of the Australian Settlement (see for example DeAngelis 2004; Smyth 2004; Stokes 2004), ‘state-paternalism’ provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the Australian way of ‘doing’ communications policy (see Castles cited in DeAngelis 2004; also Stokes 2004). However, the paternalistic approach appears to have had its day. As Rhodes (Rhodes 1996) suggests, active policy communities operating independently of centralised systems of control tend to be ‘a challenge to governability because they become autonomous and resist central guidance’.

A new way of ‘doing’ communications policy in Australia is likely to improve access and equity in relation to policy programs which to date have been unsatisfactory. For example, in its performance audit of the federal government’s program ‘Networking the Nation —The Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund’, the Australian National Audit Office (Australian National Audit Office 1999: 13) found that significantly more funding through the program went to Coalition-held electorates. Although the audit report found that ‘decision-making was equitable, with no obvious weighting in the allocation of funds to particular political parties’, 72% of the funds allocated went to Coalition seats with only 23% of the funding allocated to Labor seats. Centralised power in this regard clearly benefited the Coalition for electoral purposes. Further, the allocation of funds to the states was based on proportion of population with ‘no other needs assessment undertaken to implement the Government’s decision on the allocation of funds’ (Australian National Audit Office 1999: 15). It is not unreasonable to assume that local needs in electorates held by other parties received fewer benefits from the program. Moreover, the central administration’s ability to deliver program funding to citizens has also been called into question, especially in administrative efficiency and effectiveness in terms of actually delivering programs. The 1999 audit report suggested that ‘given the Department now has some experience in administering the program’, administrative costs could be reduced. Yet seven years later, the Metropolitan Broadband Connect program announced in March 2006 to provide $50 million to improve suburban broadband services indicated that the central administration was still struggling to deliver broadband programs (Crowe 2007b). Indeed, by February 2007 most of the funding remained unspent except for $1.3 million in ‘administrative costs’ and Australia was still well behind Canada in the OECD broadband rankings.

Canada’s results in deploying broadband infrastructure and the key themes emerging from interviews with industry elites suggest that sound policy outcomes result from: encouraging bottom-up engagement with diverse policy communities through provision of municipal (local), provincial (state), and federal representation of local and regional interests; educating policy actors through formal involvement in policy processes; enabling local and regional solutions to broadband infrastructure through partnerships between various combinations of public, private and third sector organisations; reorganising the formal boundaries of the converging communications industries; and ‘forbearing’ from competition where different service providers are competing for customers who require similar services which can be provided by a variety of different media. The latter concept is referred to here as ‘technological neutrality’ where functionality, rather than a particular technology, is regulated (Computer Laboratory 1997). Most of these approaches are absent in Australian broadband policy programs, suggesting that an old way of ‘doing’ communications policy persists. To this end, attention is now focused on early approaches to nation-building in an effort to determine history’s influence on the ‘Australian way’.