ZDNet Australia Interviews Richard Alston

ynotds writes "ZDNet Australia has an interview with notorious Australian IT Minister Senator Richard Alston which could even be read as suggesting that he, like some others in the Australian government, has learned a little about his portfolio during his 7 years at the helm. He responds openly about his censorhip regime, lack of action against spam and his antipathy towards Electronic Frontiers Australia but refuses to get into details on cyberterrorism response and security expenditure."

Re:Don't know what was worth reading in that

[RyoSaeba]

There are a few points noting, though. The one i remember on top of my head is about holding the Australian IT industry back. Alston simply points out that apart journalists, presumably in search of subjects to run, were the only ones complaining...
Apart that, yeah, fairly political thingy...

freedom of speech

[katalyst]

Hypocracy.. why do countries/polititians claim they advocate freedom of speech , when they don't. Certain issues like child pornography and terrorist organizations , I can understand. But, why should they want to censor anything else ? DO they like flexing their political arms,or do they just want to be noticed ? And why drag Korea into all this ? Korean companies anyways have a much stronger global presence than Australian companies.. except for beer ofcourse.... ;)

Do the imperfect? or don't do the imperfect

[stephendavies]

When Alston's asked about censorship, he makes this comment:

The simplistic notion that because you can't achieve 100 percent success in closing off any particular Internet site is a reason for not doing anything is not an acceptable explanation

(and similar words at the start of part 2)

It looks like he views the imperfect solution as superior to doing nothing.

But when asked about spam, and plans to legislate about that, he says:

If it's interfering with the critical infrastructure I suppose yes, but if it's interfering with normal commerce - well, you do what you can. But you don't want draconian solutions that are worse than the problem. It's a nuisance at the moment but if it started to clog up the system then we might have a very different view.

(Really not sure exactly HOW much spam would be "clogging up the system"!)

These statement seem inconsistent to me. What do others think?

Srg. Shultz gave Oz IT to the USA.

[TapeCutter]

First off Telstra's systems are basically owned by IBMGSA. I have worked as an independant contractor through EDS, IBMGSA and IBM-Biz as a developer/team leader on Telsra's internal IT systems from 95-2001. Telstra and MS are good mates, you cannot get Telstra to intall broadband unless the service man eyeballs an "original MS-Windows CD". Apparently the certifiacte that comes with an OEM machine in place of the CD is not good enough, anyhow I digress.

When two of IBM's board members turned up on the Telstra board in the mid 90's, guess who got the megabuck five year outsourcing deal in the late 90's. IBM then spent the first three years documenting and testing everything. "Y2k & GST & CSG & LNP...", "its important", "gotta be done". "Pssst, Telstra you could make a truck load of your workers redundant and impress your new shareholders". "We will make offers to the key people with "Y2K" knowlage ( suckers ).

Year number 4 sees IBM rewrite just about everything they could and re-arrange the org chart on a daily basis. By this time they didn't need expensive "contractors" ( read Alston's SME's ) because Telstra's systems were declared "Functionally stable".

A cynic might say that they froze development and systematically dispersed the old corprorate IT knowlage as best they could in order to gain control. ( The employees refer to IBM as the "Borg mother ship" ).

IBMGSA called it "diversifying skills" and "new challenges", had grand speaches about "mindshare" and played "who hid my cheese" videos to the troops.

Suddenly the telecomms/IT market took a nose dive at the height of the re-org and everything turned to crap. The result, as I see it, is that Telstra's IT is now stocked with MS cerified TAFE graduates spending most of thier time on procedures designed to "push back on problems".

There will never arise a multi-national IT company from Oz. As soon as one pokes its head up the US boys will just kick the crap out of it. What happened to EDS I hear you ask, well since MS already had the education franchise they went on to do the the South Australian Government and ( I think ) the Commonwealth bank.

Alston is the Australian answer to Sergent Shultz ..."I know nothinnnnnnng, NuuuThink. H'er Comondant Johnny".

Alan Mortimer.

BSc, Computer Science.

Melb,

Australia.

BTW. I do not make any representations for the above companys. But I do appreciate the income they gave me for a while. Politians who want my vote are fair game for comic relief :o).