The economic value of a human life is often used in public policy decision making. It is regularly used to determine the viability of mega-infrastructure projects such as highway upgrades through notorious black-spots, or tunnels to fight traffic congestion. That is, if a particular stretch of the Pacific Highway is regularly responsible (or the site of) multiple fatalities in a given year then it is a relatively straight forward calculation to determine the payback period. This would be estimated based on an economic value of Joe Citizen calculated as a formula involving life expectancy, earning capacity, net present values, discount rates, and various other economic instruments. The basic point is that human life is captialised in a trade-off against infrastructure cost.

Over the last few years we've made a few statements about the requirement for ICT to make it onto the national agenda as a foreign policy issue. Two clear areas stand-out worth exploring.

Firstly,  as the world becomes increasingly digital the source code of the major software used to enable the world will become the new fossil fuel. It will become as precious a resource as oil and consideration should be given by today's governments as to how national investments are made in the infrastructure to support this "natural resource". They will happily build a coal port or terminal to prop up exports but what about building campuses  to support the evolution of application development lanaguages, whether it be .NET or Java (increasingly manageable should IBM buy Sun), or should investments be made in a national flavour and brand of emerging open source languages?

Secondly and perhaps more tangibly in terms of how the business of ICT is governed (in the little "g" context) is an issue that continually goes unchecked by everyone from industry associations all the way to Federal government. R&D centre closures.  

Imagine coming to work tomorrow in a world without technology? Back in November Sam asked that very question in a Longview article  entitled, What the ICT industry needs is a great campaign. The article was widely distributed and read within Queensland’s key ICT industry groups. And in an Australian first, today’s Courier Mail ran a single page advertisement drawing a line in the sand for Australia’s political parties to meet them head-on under the attention grabbing headline "We already employee 70,000 Queenslanders and with your help we could create another 30,000 new jobs".

In an election campaign that has safely ignored the technology vote to-date, key industry groups including Software Queensland, AIIA, ITCRA, ASIBA, ACS, WIT, IT Gold Coast, and under-signed by the ICT Industry Working Group Executive Officer Dr Paul Campbell, are now demanding the attention of the incumbent Premier and Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg. 

Late last week Lawrence Springborg made his statement about a 3% saving across government to funnel more into front-line services. Unfortunately the cuts he indicated will potentially include technology amounting to a $40 million annual reduction for the local, national, and international industry suppliers that service Queensland Government. Somewhere along the line someone forgot that “front-line” services today are almost entirely underpinned by technology.

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.