The ability to provision environmental monitoring stations with rich data feeds, for example.
Or use of distance learning systems to try to reduce social/economic exclusion among disadvantaged groups (here's looking at the indigenous peoples' low life expectancy and poor economic outcomes).
The question is, what will this facilitate that isn't obvious (cf. concert ticket bookings and YouTube)?
]]>Internet access now is as important as the telephone was a couple of decades ago, and electricity itself (wiring up rural areas for electricity was not cheap) a few decades before that. Your whinge sounds a bit like those Thai protesters who were complaining that people in rural areas are allowed to vote and vote in ways they don't like because, well as far as I can tell, they thought rural folk were too stupid and unimportant to be trusted with votes.
]]>Also, my government is not the Australian one, I was just in Australia when I posted. I am now in France, but that is still not my government.
]]>