The new Federal government’s budget shows Canberra as lost on IT and communications issues under this government as it was under the Howard administration.
An interesting development was the continuation of the Australian Broadband Guarantee. This flags the likelihood that all the proposed broadband rollouts are really still born with the 4.7 billion proposed being absorbed into the general 20bn building Australia fund.
It seems the obsession with controlling the Internet will continue with the trial of ISP based filtering to go ahead. At least we’re getting a few more details on how this will work, although I’m still not convinced our Federal politicians have any inkling of the scope of resources required to run this program effectively.
The changes to software depreciation rates and fringe benefit tax rules for laptops are a negative marginal effect which shouldn’t really change much.
Overall, this budget is best described as “mostly harmless” to the Australian tech scene.