The Forum > General Discussion > Best uses for $43B
Best uses for $43B
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I think it's a dubious proposition (to any but tech-heads, that is)that internet speeds 100 times faster than currently available will provide much benefit to the country at all. I suspect that a version of the 80/20 rule applies to technology and that we are at a point where the productivity dividend from spending an extra dollar on bandwidth is approaching zero.
In which case if I had the money I'd be much more likely to want to spend it on infrastructure. Australia could have done much better in the last boom if our exports could have reached their markets more easily. That requires investments in ports and rail lines.
I think I would also be looking at physical infrastructure around cities. The housing crisis won't be fixed by building welfare housing, but by building more housing in general. And the constraints on that are to do with availability of land, which in turn in a lot of cases hinges on availability of infrastructure like water and sewerage which are supplied by governments. Generally governments wait for private developers to pay them to put the infrastructure in which means that a lot of land is effectively locked-up because no-one owns enough land in a particular catchment to be able to justify stumping-up the readies.
I think I would also be looking closely at education. Perhaps we could get a real education revolution for this money, rather than a computer on every child's desk.
Thinking of which there is a theme here. Seems the answer to many questions facing the government is more IT.