One thing that everyone's talking about right now in Australia is the NBN. It's probably the most dramatic change in telecommunications that has occurred in this country for many, many years but one of the most interesting things about it is the lessons that can be learnt from the experiences here and from all of the changes and regulation here for some other countries in the region.
One example of this is the reforms around universal service in telecommunications that have occurred as part of the NBN.
A universal service is basically about ensuring that everyone in the country has reasonable access to telecommunications and that's a very important social objective. But what's really interesting is how that issue is becoming so significant now in some of our major trading partners and neighbours in Asia. And I think two huge countries where there are some surprising similarities to Australia are China and Indonesia. What are the similarities? Well both of them are actually very large countries. They're countries in which the population is very geographically dispersed.
You take China - there are huge concentrations of populations on the east coast in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou but there are very large numbers of people in the centre of the country.
Indonesia, similarly, you've got Jakarta which is a major metropolis but you've got lots of far-flung islands which are very difficult to reach certainly with fixed telecommunication services.
That's quite like Australia in Australia where have you got the population with the exception of Perth it's all on the east coast, very little in the centre. So I think it follows from that that a lot of the lessons we're learning about how to efficiently provide a universal service in Australia in the context of rollout of a national broadband network are equally applicable - perhaps with some changes - to China and to Indonesia and what that does is it provides I think a very significant opportunity for us in Australia for advisors, for governments to play a significant role in assisting those countries to enhance the universal service.
Why is that important? I mean well that in a part that goes to all of the reasons why the NBN is so important here and why the reforms around the NBN are so important here. It's not just technology, it's not just the telephone, it's not even just a computer. It's a way of improving the way of life of people who are serviced by those networks and it's a very significant way of enhancing productivity.
But one of the most important things in all of those examples is how do you fund it? How do you actually fund the provision - which is often very expensive - of services to these remote areas, to these villages, to these towns which could in fact generate a lot of income and there are various ways it can be done. It can be done via direct government subsidy or it can be done via some sort of a levy on other participants in the industry.
The consideration of those sorts of issues and particularly the move towards doing it in a more free market way in a contractual model is one of the debates that's occurring right now in Australia. But I think the important thing to recognise is that so much of what is being done here could have real relevance and real benefit for those countries and for other countries in Asia.
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