ABC Regional Hubs and Hyper-Local Citizen Journalism

Its not often that I find myself in agreement with columnists in The Australian, but Mark Day's analysis of the Federal Government's decision to support the ABC in developing online regional hubs is to me pretty valid. The decision has been criticized by regional media interests such as APN, Prime Television and Rural Press (owned by Fairfax Media) but, as Day notes in relation to hyper-local online media hubs, "Where have the APN and Rural Press people been these past 15 years?".

The decision is consistent with recommendations made by Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson and myself to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy's Review of National Broadcasting in the latter part of last year. It points to the affordances of new digital media technologies in re-scaling the mandate of public broadcasters to the local and regional and not simply the national, while also opening up new opportunities for including citizens as media participants in ways that Web 2.0 technologies allow.

Will Higher Education be a GFC Casualty?

Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne predicts that Rudd Government promises on higher education will be a casualty of the budgetary deterioration from the global financial crisis (GFC), and the worsening budget deficit. Marginson points out how this involves a significant breaking of promises, and a failure to reverse the patterns of the Howard years.

He also points out how underfunding of Australian universities has driven behaviour, espeically

in relation to research and international student enrolments.

The real story is the education export industry and what drives it. This is a key weakness in policy, that began in the Hawke and Keating years, worsened under Howard and has now trapped the Rudd Government.

Since the late 1980s, when there were 25,000 international students, Australian education exports have grown by leaps and bounds. Last year there were 543,898 international students, half in higher education. They generated $15.5 billion in export earnings through tuition fees, accommodation, food, living expenses and entertainment. Education was our third largest export sector in dollar terms, behind only coal and iron ore.

Education earns more than wheat, beef, wool, gold, tourism and other staples. The growth of commodity exports has been slowed by the recession but education exports will grow in 2009 and look recession-proof, for the time being at least.

The Government does not want to do anything that would hurt education exports. Therein lies the problem.

What has driven the remarkable growth of education exports is not the fabulous quality of Australian education but its under-funding, the very under-funding that Kevin Rudd has promised to correct.

Australia was the only OECD country to reduce total public spending on higher education in 1995-2005, while student numbers grew by 30 per cent. Rudd used these facts repeatedly in the 2007 election campaign.

In universities, only about 70 per cent of the real costs of government-supported research projects are funded. Teaching is also funded below real cost levels. And the Government's subsidies for teaching are not fully indexed for cost increases.

Three things follow from this "structure of financial incentives", as the business management literature calls it. One, universities lose money on every local student and on most of their research. Two, each year the gap between funding and costs gets wider. Three, each year the universities need more non-government revenues to fill the gap.

For more read here.

Conroy's Conundrum

In the various analyses of the first year of the Rudd Labor government, a common observation was that it has been relatively free of accidents, cries and scandals, as compared with the first year of the Hawke and Howard governments. That may be about to change very quickly with the tendering process for the National Broadband Network.

TELSTRA has set a challenge for the Rudd Government, refusing to put in a detailed bid for the $10billion plus national broadband network unless it gets a range of guarantees, including that there be no further split of its operations.

But as the Government has refused to give any such guarantees ahead of tenders closing for the project yesterday, the telecommunications giant is effectively asking the Government to force tough regulations on it or give in to its demands.

A range of other bidders, led by Singtel Optus, have lodged bids for either national or state-based networks as part of a competitive process started in April. Optus said a new entity called Optus Networks Investments, backed by the Terria consortium of Telstra's rivals, had lodged a bid for the national network, alongside Acacia Australia and Axia NetMedia.

The Government has promised to commit $4.7billion -- its biggest single election commitment after tax cuts -- as a subsidy to get top-grade broadband services to regional and rural areas.

In a continuation of its anti-regulation stance, Telstra lodged a "non-compliant" bid in the form of a 12-page letter to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, from its chairman Donald McGauchie. Optus Networks Investments' proposal is said to run close to 1000 pages.

"We need a clear statement on separation or we can't bid, it is an uneconomic proposition if we don't get that," Mr McGauchie told The Australian.

Several issues are set in play by Telstra's desultory response to the NBN tender process, and its demands being palced on the Rudd government as a condition for being involved. The NBN is difficult to deliver without Telstra, and the Government would have established a very powerful corporate enemy. Moreover, Opposition communications spokesman Senator Nick Minchin is one of the wiliest players, and will use this opportunity to maximise damage on the government.

On the other hand, to accept Telstra's demands now leaves the Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, open to the charge that he is a puppet of Telstra, as well as the possibility of legal action by the Optus-led consortium, who have put forward a proper bid document of 1,000 pages, as compared to the 12-page letter from Telstra.

Clearly what the Rudd government were seeking was a clean and transparent process for awarding the NBN tender. What they now have is a clear-cut political power play, of the sort that have more commonly characterised Australian media policy, during both the Hawke-Keating years and the Howard years. The issues are accentuated precisely by the dual public/private ownership status of Telstra, and its role as both the core infrastructure provider and a competing service provider.

What looms is a protracted and difficult dispute, where it will be hard for the Government to get an early win. It marks a moment where the preference for administrative solutions has come hard up against the "friends and enemies" approach to media polciy that has more commonly prevailed in Australian history.