Todays budget for techonlogy

Well, The australian government budget was rolled out the door last night, to a lot of anxious breaths. Treasurer Wayne Swan had been warning of a tough budget, one that tried to rein in inflation and was going to be spending less and less. He more or less delivered, despite the enormous windfall that Australia's resources boom is giving the country as 20 billion dollar surplus to play with.

So, in interest, what does this mean for those working in Technology. A lot. Heres a smorgasbord selection of some of the interesting money movements:

• The biggest feature by far, is a pledge for 4.7 billion dollars to create a national broadband network, that will give fast internet access to 98% of Australians. The tender to run and build the network is going to go out soon, and has thankfully two bidders (Optus, Telstra). This is going to, perhaps, be the most important part of the technology for the budget. This is delivered out of the surplus from the mining activities in the country, and will serve as part of the infrastructure projects that the government is promising to pay for using the surplus. This will bring Australia into line with other countries in terms of broadband infrastructure. Finally.
• Over a billion dollars going to a desalination plant, which isn't tech, but the power for it is going to be from a Wind Power plant. If we ever want to have data centers, getting power for them is going to be important, and all the alternative energy sources we can get are going to help with every rack that could be built. Australia has been relying coal for a long time, and though the Snowy Mountains Dam is a Hydro powered scheme, few other alternative sources exist, even though we have a lot of potential in solar and wind. Its interesting that the government is going to use Wind Power for something as important as drinking water, and certainly will be a boon to any infrastructure financing companies that have thought about building out alternative power sources. The company that is building the Wind station is Babcock & Brown Wind Power, which has long been a stock market pariah as part of that group. The renewed confidence and bidding for public infrastructure projects in the coming months will be exciting.
• Interestingly, there's 126 million dollars in cyber safety spending, with 50 million dollars going straight to Australian Federal Police child Protection Operations over 4 years. Thats 13 million dollars a year, and presumably may have some contracts for folks to build some software infrastructure to help them do that. There's apparently 91 officers being added to the online protection task force: sounds like a lot of people for me; Frightening that there are so many abused children out there to warrant it.
• 37 million bucks to switch australians to digital t: Who knows whether australians really care? Moreover, do broadcasters?
• Laptop and technology purchases are going to be limited by a much more stringent FBT testing regime, and removing the purchases from depreciable assets lists. This change basically means buying a laptop will be more expensive for anyone that doesn't have a company pay for theirs, and could curtail spending on hardware in Australia. Expect hardware prices & demand to go down, in line with taxation changes.
• Software depreciation time to be extended from 2.5 years to 4 years. This is interesting: the increased depreciation rate makes software purchase more expensive, and will probably push companies towards service based contracts rather than purchase contracts; Any company that needs to buy or upgrade their software solutions is now going to think twice about buying the latest Office, and it may be cheaper to start considering some of the online alternatives that are coming out. The government expects to save about 100 million dollars a year for this change, but I wonder if it will have a bigger effect of encouraging the game change away from purchase to service in Australia.
• The commercial ready grants program, a program to give government angel funding to innovative companies has been canned. Rather, The government will build advisory centers on how to commercialise technology. Part of the reason of why the government VC fund is, as quoted in the governments own report, the grants funded too many projects that would have had the funding to develop without any government funding anyway. It never made sense to me that the government acted like a VC, anyway.

Phew, thats a long list, and it's only what I think is really relevant to Tech. Have you got any thoughts on the Australian budget? and what it means to you? I'd be really interested in anyones opinion, and what they think it will mean for IT in Australia.