Public, private partnership crucial to broadband boom
Australia will only reap the true benefits of a digital technology boom if there is a solid partnership between the public and private sectors, Telstra boss David Thodey has warned.
Speaking at a WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry lunch yesterday, Mr Thodey painted a bleak picture of inefficiency and an uncompetitive market if the two sectors did not start collaborating.
“I do worry that we are not really working together across state, federal, even local government with think tanks, academics and the private sector. The private sector must play a critical role and it must be commercially driven,” Mr Thodey said.
“Now I do understand that sometimes you have to invest in the long-term but if you lose the commercial imperative I believe you get a lesser outcome and that’s what I’ve always stood for.
“That’s the problem with the world where the private sector’s not tabled in, you start to get inefficiency so we would say we need a collaboration between public sector and private sector going forward.”
Curtin University’s internet studies Professor Matthew Allen said no venture should be a “primarily public” one and there should be controls put in place to ensure a competitive and fair marketplace.
“What is needed is to distinguish between the control and provision of the underpinning infrastructure, what you might call the wholesale infrastructure, and the provision of specific services based on that infrastructure,” Professor Allen said.
He cited Labor’s mooted National Broadband Network as an example, and said a public company could have a “monopoly provision” to manage and control access to the network, parts of which could later be sold at a fair market price to public companies to ensure competitiveness.
Mr Thodey would not be drawn on whether Telstra preferred the NBN or the Coalition’s plan to use a patchwork of technologies, saying only the company remained “policy agnostic on broadband”.
“Today we are actively engaged with NBN, we have a non-binding financial agreement with the current government, which we are actively working on,” he said.
“We have not in any way deviated from that, that’s what we signed up to do and until that changes we ain’t changing.”
He said a change of government wouldn’t have an impact on Telstra because the NBN was a long-term project in its infancy.