At the annual Queensland Premier’s AIIA Luncheon in Brisbane yesterday Premier Anna Bligh discussed how the State had just completed its submission to the Broadband Advisory Committee in Canberra. Her announcement was that the Queensland Government would dip into its annual ~$180million telecommunications spend (across all government departments and agencies) to fund the missing connections to 2% of the Queensland population in the fibre-to-the-node national broadband network.

While there were conditions, and while ensuring connections for Queensland’s share of that national 2% deficit may seem trivial in "the grand scheme" (approximately 85,000 people), it was a statement reminiscent of a state still brooding and reawakening from past injustices dolled out by the Federal government.

While many assume that Queensland state parochialism and isolationism was a legacy of the Bjelke-Petersen era of politics, the stronger cultural foundation goes back decades earlier. The scar had already been deeply carved by the end of World War II during which the Federal Government mapped an invisible line of latitude, the Brisbane Line, around the time the Japanese invaded Darwin. Everything north of it was marked indefensible by the government. A child had been abandoned.

The silo and siding towns of Queensland with their broad-acre farms and utilitarian sheds where the ground smelt of lanolin or sump were left to their own defence and the harshness of the brigalow scrub. That political decision endorsed isolation. It endorsed southern parochialism and it ushered in an age of disenfranchisement and perceived lawlessness above the State-line. Queenslanders felt they were left to rot. But life went on at a slower pace and as a people Queenslanders were forced to prosper in each other.

So rather than an attitude of “who cares about spending a few million on ensuring that 85,000 farmers, miners, and school-of-the-air children are internet connected”, the Bligh government’s submission reaches far beyond tokenism in this instance.

Having said that, rhetoric and tokenism did run rampant at times during the Premier’s address. Afterall it is hard to take the $60 million ICT Projects Innovation Fund seriously (announced as part of Smart Directions Statement 2: 2008-2012) when considered in the context of the roads, tunnel, water and port infrastructure spend currently underway in the state.

To highlight this even further was the quick speech by Bevan Slattery, MD of Pipe Networks who gave a short address on the construction of their Sydney-Guam submarine cable (read the upcoming June Longview editorial for more on this).  At a cost of $200 million the economic prosperity delivered by the Project Runway broadband cable will far outstrip that delivered by the 334m Tugun By-Pass tunnel which was constructed at more than twice the cost ($423 million to the State Government; $100m + more from Federal funding).

So again, while I don’t think the state’s broadband committee submission represents tokenism, I do think that it highlights a mismatch in understanding of what is achievable and important in terms of the state’s ICT infrastructure within the global ICT economy. It begs the question as to what kind of economic benefit could the state derive on its journey from a geo-political to a knowledge economy if it now invested $200-300m in the construction of its own pacific cable and really connected Queensland to the world, as opposed to connecting it to the rest of Australia.