Council bringing fibre to Christchurch

via my twitter search monitor...
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/much-ado-about-broadband-garden-city-103150

Much ado about broadband in the Garden City
Council-owned broadband company, Enable Networks, will spend another $36 million and will seek $500 million of government funding to deliver its fibre optic network to every city household.

http://enablenetworks.co.nz/

Fibre-to-the-wall is the very big reason I don't bother looking for an alternative to TelstraClear in my area, I'd be really keen to see what alternatives pop up on this network.

It's not about innovation

Against a net reduction in research funding in the 2009/10 New Zealand budget was an increase of $190 million over four years (followed by $70 million annually) to what they are calling a Primary Growth Partnership initiative, so in theory to be matched dollar for dollar by industry, to promote innovation in the primary sector. I've taken a strong interest in this because of my rural and on-farm-research history.

Bunch of links mostly from Hon. David Carter, Minister of Agriculture
Initial announcements
David Carter's blogs, one, two
NZ Herald article

Today's speech at Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce Budget Breakfast with more details.

Firstly I'm not prepared to believe in any more of that money than has been allocated in this budgetary year ($30 million) which is divided between:

- $2 million to five sections: pastoral and arable production (fibre, meat, milk, cropping); horticulture; seafood; forestry and wood products; and food processing.
- $15 million in a contestable fund open to any sector to bid for.
- $5 million for a new Centre for Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research, with the rationale that Our emissions profile, made up predominately from ruminant animal emissions, leaves us in a unique situation when compared to other developed nations. It makes sense that New Zealand leads the global effort to develop agricultural emission mitigation technologies.

Tentatively I'll accept that the next two years of funding are feasible, then it's an election and all bets are off.

There are other reasons to doubt that much will come of this. The Minister said today

For 20 years we, as a nation, haven't invested enough in primary sector research and development.
Many of the recent productivity increases we have achieved on-farm are as a result of research done almost 30 years ago.

Looking at how the PGP will work (second link) it's all about business plans. No money for the fundamental research which might lead to a game-changing discovery/product - or might not. If you've already done the hard work and can convince the powers that be that you already have a product that could be sold, then you'll get some money. If you already have a product and want to offload half your development costs to the public purse, you're in.

From my time in the industry I know that the reason we're stuck with 30 year old research is exactly this focus on not funding something unless it already shows enough promise to be marketed. It's really hard to do innovative research under those conditions - real innovation comes from venturing into wild new territory, following leads that may not immediately pan out commercially but which still provide useful information to build on.

Profit driven industry may fail to make a good case for this 'non-commercial' research, but this is the funding gap that government (blue, red, green or plaid) should be looking to fill with it's use of public money (and I'm not just talking about in agriculture here). Don't force our top minds to take their inspirations overseas for funding, or restrict them to what they can cobble together in their garages at the weekend.

So while the money is great, I don't think this approach is going to address the actual problem even though it's been so clearly, if accidentally, identified.