Attempts to reinvigorate federalism in Australia are not new (Brown & Bellamy 2006). Indeed, the Rudd Labor government is currently in the process of delivering ‘new federalism’ (Franklin 2008) through harnessing ‘the goodwill of wall-to-wall State and Territory Labor governments’. In effect, the Coalition of Australian Governments (COAG) is more cooperative under Labor than it was under the previous Howard government. Nevertheless, COAG is still a centralised institution and while it does take into account state and territory issues, it is still focused on the single national policy solution. Canada’s broadband outcomes from a nation-building perspective have enabled nation-building to commence from within the citizenry, rather than from an externally imposed central body. Canada’s approach provides the social capital that enables communications networks to function beyond the technical capabilities and into the realm of the tacit where most social benefits can be derived.

Reinvigorating federalism in an Australian context is unlikely to move beyond the ‘Australian way’ if recent infrastructure initiatives offer any insight to the future. The old way of thinking about communications policy is unlikely to develop the human element of the national network where ‘the edge-nodes are both end-users and relay points that may be interconnected into a mesh to provide wide-area connectivity … [where] there is no centralized network coordination … [and] the ‘network’ grows ‘virally’ as end-users add equipment to the network’ (Lehr et al 2005: 3). The establishment of Infrastructure Australia (see Walker 2007) will no doubt improve some aspects of Australia’s infrastructure crisis, but treating broadband infrastructure in the same way policy–makers treat other types of infrastructure is conceptually narrow and unlikely to meet the needs of citizens as users. Canada provides a number of lessons for Australia in reinvigorating federalism — considered here an enabling quality of modern nation-building. Regrettably, the ‘Australian way’ persists and is likely to do so into the foreseeable future unless ‘left-field’ ideas which challenge the status quo are considered seriously in policy debates.