TelSoc has advocated for a long-term bipartisan strategic framework to best ensure that all Australians are able to make effective use of world-class broadband services. TelSoc has committed to monitor and facilitate progress towards achieving such a strategy and to reporting on the nature and extent of the progress regularly.

 

TelSoc has considered how best to describe the strategy that it seeks, originally referring to a National Broadband Strategy and now considering that the term Digital Communications Strategy should be preferred because it avoids excessive emphasis on technological and supply-side dimensions at the expense of user requirements and capabilities.

 

As a means of assessing progress towards a national Digital Communications Strategy during 2022, TelSoc has used a gap analysis approach – that is, reviewing the status of the 2021 assessment of the extent to which developments during the year have affected the gap between where Australia is, and where it ideally needs to be, in establishing and implementing a Digital Communications Strategy (DCS).

 

2022 has been a year of change and of changing priorities, as well as of hope that initiatives since the election will lead to a more specific commitment to a coherent, overarching Digital Communications Strategy in 2023. The prospects are considered by TelSoc to be positive, notwithstanding uncertainty on much of the detail. TelSoc will continue to press for such an industry-wide long-term Strategy to be developed in a consultative manner.

 

Please refer to the TelSoc newsletter listing for access to the copy of the draft PDF report: https://telsoc.org/news/assessing-australias-progress-towards-national-digital-communications-strategy

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