Page 891 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 9 April 2014

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(d) the benefits that free Wi-Fi will bring to civic life and tourism in our town centres;

(e) the potential for high skilled job growth in our innovative information and communications technology sector in the ACT …

These are all good points, and we ourselves support them. However, till now all ACT taxpayers have been presented with is a 20-page brochure. Even the brochure itself describes the plan as follows:

It is a statement of Canberra’s digital aspirations and the principles and actions to work towards this future.

Yet we are being asked to blindly trust this government. And the only financial figure mentioned is $4.4 million. Given that the statement is aspirational, are we to assume this $4.4 million is also aspirational? Where are the details? When exactly will each priority and action be delivered? By whom? And for how much?

According to a report prepared in 2012 by the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, the ACT had a total of 24,307 small businesses. Yet only 489 responded to the Canberra digital survey. That means that 489 out of over 24,000 businesses responded to this survey. It represents a very small number, and this small number has been the basis of this action plan: 0.02 per cent of businesses are represented in this plan.

Let us take a look at some more of the information provided in the brochure. If you look at page 7 of the plan, it looks at the total usage of social media. Ms Burch may be interested to know that, of the respondents to the survey, 41 per cent use Twitter for news and events. Might I suggest that some use it a little more eloquently than others.

It is not until page 12 that we actually get into the “guiding principles” of the plan and discuss the vision and actions—but again without the detail required to provide ACT taxpayers with assurances of successful delivery.

The potential benefits that free wi-fi will bring to civic life and tourism in our town centres, I would argue, will be directly proportionate to the quality of the service delivered. Again, in the absence of any detail, it is hard to determine whether this will in fact be the case, whether it will be a plus for Canberra. We need to make sure that the service provides enough bandwidth to deal with the take-up. Ensuring privacy for consumers is paramount in the success of this project. With the trial of free wi-fi on ACTION buses to “commence soon”—when you take into account that this was promised two years ago, it cannot be soon enough—it is also difficult to determine where this project will end up. Will free wi-fi be on all ACTION buses? Will the success or otherwise of this trial result in the project being extended or reduced across Canberra? None of this is known. And we are missing direction on the level of service to be delivered.

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