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     digital divides in Australia

This page looks at digital divides in Australia.

It covers -

• introduction
• background
• indigenous and other users
• studies
• costs
• initiatives
• advocacy

     introduction

As in other advanced economies, debate in Australia about digital divides has centred on the physical availability of infrastructure (in particular broadband) and pricing that permits comprehensive consumer access to that infrastructure, rather than concerns regarding education, disability or other barriers. Such concerns are highlighted in works such as Tony Vinson's Dropping Off The Edge (Melbourne: Jesuit Social Services 2007) which offer a caution in considering rhetoric that there is a single divide or that all divides can be bridged merely by providing infrastructure.

In July 2006 the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its quarterly Snapshot of Broadband Deployment report, claiming that broadband connections in Australia had passed the three million mark, with 3,161,600 broadband services connected across the country. That was up 78% over the preceding year.

     background

The statistics highlighted in the Internet Metrics & Statistics guide suggest that -

• around 54% of Australian households had access to the net (the apparent discrepancy in NOIE and other figures reflects access via work)
• most access at home was via narrowband, as of the first Quarter of 2003
• broadband connections passed the three million mark in early 2006
• 75% of adults (ie people of age 16 years and over) "had access" to the net during that Quarter, although the number and duration of sessions online varied considerably
• 72% of all business had access (81% of large businesses and 34% of small business had web sites)

There has been significant normalisation of the online population since 1997 - which now has similar demographics to those of the population at large - but 'power users' are still predominantly young, male, earning in excess of $75,000, employed, and living in metropolitan areas. 

Those on low incomes, without tertiary education, living in rural/remote areas, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, with disabilities, with a language background other than English, and aged over 55 are less likely to be online. Why? Barriers to online access include set-up and access costs, lack of physical access, disinterest/confidence or perceptions of irrelevance, security concerns, lack of skills/training and illiteracy.

What about infrastructure? Despite the size of Australia, its population is one of the most concentrated in the world. 1998 figures from the Australian Communications Authority (now ACMA) suggested that 63% of Australia's total 6.8 million households are located in the eight State and Territory capital cities, 28% in regional provincial centres and 9% in rural and remote areas. An estimated 83% of all Australian households were within five kilometres of an exchange.

A 1997 note by the Australian Bureau of Statistics highlighted that a substantial proportion of the population at that time had neither a computer nor a telephone:

There were some 575,000 Disability Pensioners in 1999.

     indigenous and other users

Figures for use of the net (and ICT) by indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders are problematical, given the thinness of much of the data and uncertainty about particular demographics.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics noted a marked difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in use of information technology in the week preceding the 2001 census, including -

• home computer use - 18% of Indigenous population, 44% of non-Indigenous population
• home internet use - 9% of Indigenous population, 29% of non-Indigenous population
• internet use overall - 16% of Indigenous population, 39% of non-Indigenous population

The difference between males and females in use of IT within both populations is reported as being small. Slightly more Indigenous females (19%) than Indigenous males (17%) had used a computer at home, whereas more males (46%) than females (43%) in the non-Indigenous population had used a computer at home. The difference in the rate of IT use among Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth was substantial: 28% of Indigenous 15-17 year olds had used a computer at home, compared with 75% of non-Indigenous teenagers in the same age cohort, with internet use at 29% versus 70% respectively. Indigenous persons living in Very Remote areas were least likely to have used IT, with 3% of the 71,100 Indigenous persons in those areas having used a computer at home, 1% had used the net at home and 4% had used the net overall.

The June 2010 'IT Use and Innovation in Australian Business' report from the ABS suggested that 90.5% of Australian businesses had "internet access" in 2008/9 (up from 86.8% in the preceding year). 41.5% had a web presence (up from 36.3%). 95% of those employing 200 or more persons had a web presence. 46% placed orders via the net. 27% received orders via the net.

     studies

Jennifer Curtin's 2001 research brief on A Digital Divide in Rural and Regional Australia? for the federal parliament's library concentrates on the bush, at the expense of divides within major metropolitan areas, but explores political questions elided in most studies. Suzanne Willis & Bruce Tranter's nuanced 'Beyond the 'digital divide': Internet diffusion and inequality in Australia' (42 Journal of Sociology, 2006), which builds on their 2002 Beyond the Digital Divide: Socio-Economic Dimensions of Internet Diffusion in Australia (PDF) is recommended.

The 2000 'NATSEM' report for Telstra on Sociodemographic Barriers to Telecommunications Use argues that the Australian 'digital divide' is one of income and social situation, not geography - questioning the government's concern with supply to rural areas. It was prepared by the Communications Law Centre (CLC), Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) and National Centre for Social & Economic Modelling.

The report builds on the Access to electronic commerce and new service and information technologies for older Australians and people with a disability report by the Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission and the landmark 1999 report (PDF) on Web Sites for Rural Australia: Designing for Accessibility by the Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation (RIRDC).

The latter highlighted issues relating to regional use of the web, including uncertain (and expensive connections), slow download times and older machines or browsers.

NATSEM's significant because it highlights the divide within metropolitan and regional Australia, in contrast to federal government initiatives focussed on 'the bush' (and Tasmania). It argues that the Australian 'digital divide' is one of income and social situation, not geography per se that use of the net had little link with where people lived. CLC Director Jock Given commented that

these kinds of measures will not be enough to bridge the digital divide. Low-income earners, the unemployed and the elderly have not even connected to the net. If you are poor or lack good education it is not going to make much difference how many satellites we put in the sky or how many cables we run past your house. A broader and more complex social policy agenda is going to be necessary if Australia is to seriously address the root causes of its digital divide. There is a digital divide in Australia with the key factors education, level of income, age and the presence of children in a household ... if you are unable to participate in ... activities (on the Internet), there is a broadly held concern that this will be increasingly significant from the view point of social and economic opportunity.

Recent data on Indigenous disadvantage is provided in the Productivity Commission's 2007 report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2007. For base data about the 'disabled' see the 2004 study on Children With Disabilities In Australia.

Earlier research includes the 2004 Productivity Commission report on International Benchmarking of Remote, Rural and Urban Telecommunications Services.

     initiatives

The 2001 Building Bridges over the Digital Divide report from the Commonwealth Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) provides an overview of "the considerable progress made by government, industry and the community in making electronic commerce more accessible to older Australians and people with a disability".

Close examination of the review and its laundry list of recommendations (including implementation by Commonwealth agencies of legislation and cabinet decisions) suggests that there's a long way to go.

The report coincided with publication by the Australian Bankers' Association (ABA) of a Disability Action Plan, including a 16 page Draft Industry Standard on Internet Banking (here), and the report (txt) of the ACT Digital Divide Task Force.

The Digital Divide page of the National Office for the Information Economy makes interesting reading, highlighting 

regulatory initiatives to encourage greater competition in the telecommunications market; grants programs to fund the development of telecommunications infrastructure, community access facilities and training; a range of educational skills development initiatives; and providing government services electronically in ways that enable access for all sectors of the community, including the disabled

in line with the January 1999 Strategic Framework for the Information Economy (StratF) and the Digital Divide Cross Sector Working Group (CSWG) convened by Cisco Systems to "foster greater collaboration and shared learning around Digital Divide projects in Australia."

At the national level those initiatives included -

• the Networking the Nation (NTN) program and associated Social Bonus programs such as the New Connections Toolkit, with $592 million from Telstra's sale to upgrade regional, rural and remote telecommunications
• a 5-year, $70 million rural transaction centre program of the Dept of Transport & Regional Services to help small, rural communities establish 'community access centres' as gateways to basic services such as banking, post, phone, fax, the net, Medicare and of course Centrelink.
• an Education & Training Action Plan for the Information Economy with funding of up to $5 million for an Information Technology & Telecommunications (IT&T) Skills Exchange and a Computers for Schools initiative through which "surplus Commonwealth and State government computers are donated to government and non-government schools .... To date, approximately 18,000 computers have found their way to deserving schools." Undeserving ones buy their own?
• the Government Online Strategy, a whole-of-government approach for wiring the federal bureaucracy, reflecting the Prime Minister's commitment that "the Commonwealth will bring all appropriate services online via the Internet by 2001"

The Cross Sector Working Group comprises 30 corporate, community and government organisations "endeavouring to encourage collaboration on Digital Divide projects, and to create an ongoing forum for the exchange of ideas and identifying new project opportunities to tackle digital exclusion in Australia" using the Digital Dividend clearinghouse (an entity that ceased to operate in 2006 as sponsors suffered digital divide fatigue).

NOIE's October 2000 E-Commerce Across Australia report argued that e-commerce would neutralise the tyranny of distance and place us all on a level footing in the global marketplace. That report was problematical but is of interest as an expression of digital boosterism around the time of the dot-com bubble and for its analysis of potential impacts on regional Australia.

In June 2003 the national government announced a response to the independent Regional Telecommunication ('Estens') Inquiry, indicating that it "accepted all 39 recommendations of the Inquiry and developed a comprehensive response which included 'future proofing' regional Australian telecommunications".

In 2004 the federal government announced a National Broadband Strategy (NBS) and associated Action Plan, followed shortly thereafter by news that the National Office for the Information Economy was to become the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO). The NBS was promoted as providing access to affordable broadband services in regional Australia and was accompanied by sectoral programs such as the Department of Health & Ageing 'Access to Broadband Technology Initiative', later the Broadband for Health Program.

The NBS Action Plan

seeks to improve the price and increase the availability of broadband services in regional, rural and remote Australia, with a particular focus on consumers, SMEs and the health and education sectors.

A sense of its band-aid approach (and rebadging of past measures) can be gained by considering the "key elements ... already underway" -

• a $107.8 million Higher Bandwidth Incentive Scheme (HiBIS) to ensure the wider availability of affordable broadband services by providing subsidies to service providers
• a $23.7 million Coordinated Communications Infrastructure Fund (CCIF) to build on broadband infrastructure developments in key public sector areas such as health and education
• a $8.3 million demand aggregation broker program to consolidate demand for broadband services at a regional and sectoral level to attract additional infrastructure investment.

     costs

The business and social costs of divides in Australia are anyone's guess and are necessarily contentious.

Back-of-an-envelope estimates of the cost of rolling out broadband across Australia have ranged from $20 billion in the early 1990s to a more recent $50 billion.

Given our view of a range of divides - ie more than just fibre-to-the-home (ftth) - the real cost would be higher, potentially embracing reduced access charges, training, personal computers and other spending. We have highlighted particular issues in the complementary profile on the Australian and New Zealand telecommunications sector.

     advocacy

In contrast to North America, where there has been a proliferation of advocacy groups concerned with domestic and overseas divides (one Toronto contact characterised it as a festival of pigs at the pastry cart), there has been surprisingly little ongoing lobbying regarding Australian digital divides.

Arguably that is because conceptualisation of divides has been 'captured' by the often arid debate about privatisation and regulation of Telstra, often pitched as 'looking after the bush' through provision of cheap broadband connectivity. Discussion about other divides has been very muted.

Civil society advocates include -

• ISOC-AU | here
• Consumers' Telecommunications Network | here
  
  
  

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