ICT Users in Remote Indigenous Communities

Information and communications technologies (ICT) have been increasingly integrated into the delivery of many public and commercial services including banking, health, education and social security assistance. They have also become an important medium for social interaction and can help reduce the sense of isolation of people in remote communities. Adequate access to ICT infrastructure, a prerequisite to the delivery of services, has therefore attracted much attention in public policy-making. Remote Indigenous communities being among the most disadvantaged in Australian society have attracted some special attention. For them, access to adequate telecommunications services are thought to be crucial to the delivery of public services aimed at improving their socio-economic wellbeing. In the past decade, acknowledging the poor state of communication infrastructure and service delivery in remote Indigenous communities, governments have implemented several programs and policy initiatives with the aim of improving access and use of telephone internet services of residents in those communities. While initiatives such as the Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (TAPRIC) have helped provide access to basic facilities, the use of communications services remains at very low levels. The latest relevant data by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)1, for example, show that 78.7 per cent of Indigenous people in remote communities (rising to 92.2 per cent in very remote communities) did not have access to the Internet in 2006