The traditional, old media will provide the oxygen for the new. Their futures will be inextricable – as the latter-day interest of Rupert Murdoch and others shows.

The initial dot-com boom busted because the existing print and broadcast media’s entrepreneurial skills in marketing and content were not driving it. This time round those lessons have been learnt.

Well, so much for the Government’s insurance policy of net diversity against fresh concentration of ownership in the existing media.

And we shall see whether the National Party falls for the Government’s bill of goods for the country. Already, country people live largely in a pre-television age, so far as their daily lives and interests are concerned. Television on offer to them comes on relay from the metropolitan networks.

True, the regionals do offer local news which is under constant threat of rationalisation. News is the extent of localism. Which, by the way, neither the ABC nor the SBS matches. (Let’s see what the national broadcasters do with the newfound freedom of their digital channels.)

What is ahead for country Australia? Most likely the diminution of existing diversity of newspapers and radio. There is not even the mirage of diversity to flow from digital and broadband developments.

Rural Australia is being punished heavily by the lopsided nature of Senator Coonan’s offering. Lopsided because what is on offer for the media is unrelated to telecommunications. How can a media policy be relevant for the 21st century when it fails to recognise that the existing media and telcos are first cousins? Telstra’s limbo is just the most blatant sign of the Government’s failure to develop an integrated communications strategy.

It’s a failure but it’s a failure that will hit rural Australia most heavily.