Projects

Policies for a Communications Act 2010

This project opens the way for fresh thinking about communications policy. To make the issues more concrete, it sets out options for a Communications Act three years into the future. That is to help people focus on the future, and how Australia could move to a modern set of laws. The project will offer realistic options for policies and regulation affecting the Australian communications sectors to move ahead. This involves telecommunications, broadcasting, Internet, e-commerce and print media.

Download the Outline
The outcomes
Where will the analysis and information come from?
Why a Communications Act?
Why 2010?
Is this about more laws or regulation?

Download the Outline
Please click here to download the PDF outline of the project. The outline contains several pages of headings and descriptions, to provide a starting-point for people interested.

The outcomes
The outcomes will be an organised set of issues and policy options, each with arguments pro and con. The options will be definite, so that they could be a basis for a Communications Bill 2010. These options will offer more than just approaches or directions. They will provide a platform for making actual decisions about what to do.

The format will be like a series of cabinet submissions, or an issues paper at a company board meeting, with options showing pros and cons. On each issue, all the known options will be set out. We will not pick winning solutions, or even rank solutions. The purpose is to help the communications community make their own decisions.

The Network Insight Institute website will display material under the initial headings of the project, updated as more material comes in.

Where will the analysis and information come from?
The Institute will provide the categories and headings of the project, and will decide how the material is organised. It will be responsible for consistency, and will require that contributors agree to the Institute’s editorial role, which will be directed to taxonomy; not to censoring material.

Anyone interested is welcome to submit material. This is an open and independent project. Before long, we hope to include links and references to reports about future policy, from official Australian sources and published sources of all kinds. The intention is that, as the project expands, anyone who looks at an issue in the CA10 project will find what others have written and said, as well as original material created for the project.

We shall give similar treatment to relevant overseas sources, but more selectively based on what would be relevant to the Australian environment and constitution. We certainly intend to include more than the usual comparisons with large English-speaking countries.

Why a Communications Act?
The focus is on what would be required in a new Communications Act. The purpose of that goal is to require rigorous thinking about the options; options which can be translated into definite principles, capable of being formulated succinctly; and most of all capable of being implemented. Many good reform ideas never get past the general conceptual stage. We hope to take the process one step further through focusing on what would be needed for an Act.

The project will not attempt to draft legislation. It is about optimal structures and governance rather than specific words of any law. Legislative drafters bring their specialised expertise to bear at the end of a long decision process. The project is to help people decide what kind of instructions should be given to a drafter, not how the drafters should do their job.

Why 2010?
Our experience through a series of projects about the communications future has been that contributors are torn between two mindsets. The first mindset could be called ‘issues of the moment'. It besets people working hard on this month’s regulatory contest or lobbying effort. People with those burdens try to think about the future, but they remain mired the present. The second mindset is Utopian. Well-meaning Utopians imagine a world free of human frailty, and try to plan a future scenario unbounded by realism. That can be useful for analysis, but only if it is then followed by the hard work of testing the ideal future against what is possible to achieve given our imperfect instruments of policy and law.

The Institute thinks the vital timescale is in between ‘issues of the moment’ and Utopia. The middle road is forward-looking and freed from the impact of immediate conflicts and prejudices. On the other hand, it is still focused on feasible, practicable scenarios, and the environment which is already emerging. So a period three years ahead of the present has been chosen to strike that balance.

Is this about more laws or regulation?
Under most of the issues, there will be an option to remove all regulation, or even for the Commonwealth to pass laws preventing other authorities from filling ‘vacuums’. Just as the project will set out a variety of proposals for regulation, it will also set out proposals for removing and preventing regulation.

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