Chris Cusack
General Manager, nbn Local, Nbn Co
Chris Cusack was appointed General Manager nbn Local in March 2020. He has held roles at NBN Co since March 2017. Chris is a seasoned telecommunications executive with over 30 years’ experience in leadership roles across sales and marketing and community engagement focussed on regional and rural telecommunications.
He has a Master of Business Administration, a Bachelor of Business degree and an Associate Diploma in electrical and electronic engineering.
The New Essential Service: Digital Infrastructure and Future Places
Across the 20th Century, public utilities planned, constructed and rapidly expanded complex distribution networks for electricity, gas, water and wastewater. These essential services continue to be fundamental building blocks of how our communities are planned and operate.
Interestingly, factors such as local, regional and state ownership (both current and historic) of these utilities and state government legislative and regulatory frameworks have played a role in building decades of practice and interlock – imperfect as they may be – between development assessment and strategic planning processes and the design and deployment of utilities.
This offers a unique contrast to telecommunications networks, or digital infrastructure, whose planning, design and deployment is both heavily regulated by the Commonwealth and where historically, at large scale at least, asset ownership has been vested.
This raises a crucial question. In a world undergoing rapid social and economic transformations driven by digitalisation, what role should local and state government planners play with digital infrastructure networks, vendors and technologists in order to shape how this new essential service will impact our future places?
In short, there is an ever-increasing need for planners from across specialisations of the profession to build their knowledge and awareness of the implications of digital infrastructure for their respective work.
How does the social planner measure and factor in the levels of digital exclusion within their community? What digital infrastructure standards should development assessment planners call for and how should strategic planners ensure future capacity is addressed to meet the needs of emerging industries and future growth? And how can place makers harness digital infrastructure to be a precinct enabler that is relevant to the needs of a particular location?
