My five-year-old wants a new iPad case for Christmas. He found and showed me a picture of it online.
Technology is certainly changing the way we live and shop, and it’s transforming the way we work.
We can’t imagine many of the jobs our kids will be doing when they grow up.
So how do we help them prepare for a society and a workforce that are changing so fast we can hardly keep up with the present, let alone imagine the future?
There’s two things above all others: give our kids strong foundational skills for a love of life-long learning, and build a fast broadband network – the highway of the future.
Bill Shorten has laid out our plans for better teaching of science, technology, engineering, and maths and teaching coding – the computer language our kids will need to learn to be content creators, not just passive users of computers in the future.
But the high tech jobs of the future will need the information super highway to transport their goods to market: we need a universal, high speed National Broadband Network (NBN). Just as we once built national road and rail networks to get our goods to market, we now need to build a NBN.
That was the job Malcolm Turnbull inherited when he became Communications Minister. Many people thought that with his business background he’d do a good job. Mr Turnbull said before winning that he could do the NBN faster than the then Labor government was doing it.
So how are things looking with the NBN — the most important piece of infrastructure that will be built in our lifetimes?
Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN will be slower
Malcolm Turnbull made a decision to use older, slower copper technology, rather than more of optical fibre. NBN Co’s optical fibre network can already deliver a gigabit (1,000 megabits a second or mbps) down and 400 mbps up. But on Malcolm’s slow copper NBN, the only speed that NBN will guarantee is 25mbps.