With the talk of reassigning the portfolio of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (dBCDE) from Sen.Conroy to Sen.Lundy (which I wholeheartedly support, Sen.Lundy would really do well there), I want to question why we actually still have a separate department that deals with communications and IT.

Creating a BCDE department certainly made sense a while ago (a great improvement over the previous scenario), but now IT really is an integral part of any business, and communications is a means of transport, just like the Internet and the road outside your house. It’s infrastructure!

Today, viewing a road and the Internet as separate actually causes more conceptual problems. With hindsight, I really like the old term “Information Super Highway” as it accurately puts the Internet in the context of a road (for information) and also that like a road it’s a bidirectional medium not a one-way provider->consumer path. I believe this perspective is very important.

IT and Internet is not an (optional) extra for people and businesses to work, it’s essential, so integrated planning makes sense. When considering a new suburb or even a new city, you need to consider how people are going to work – having good Internet infra at enables telecommuting (people working remotely for a business elsewhere) and local entrepreneurship (locally operated business, possibly with employees elsewhere!)

For instance, with a good information infrastructure there’s no intrinsic necessity to place offices in a town centre. It completely changes the way town and infrastructure planning works.

The coalition talking about ditching the NBN is (to me) ignorant, it’s a capital infrastructure project just like good roads and water supply. We literally cannot do without when designing and building our future living and work environment. It’s interesting to see how Australian liberals, usually very pro road-building and the like, don’t appear to grasp that what they’re opposing is a road. Not like a road – it IS a road.

Perhaps full integration of these concepts into a new department right now (particularly pre-election) is a step too far, but thinking about it in this context will at least enable us to take the next step in what I think is the right direction.