Is there someway to determine the current network fee from the bitcoin network/daemon?
Check the medium fee of last n blocks? I believe the transaction fee is currently not very variable. The reference implementation "ensures" that all transactions that are smaller than 1000 bytes, have all outputs over 0,01 BTC and have a large enough priority will be processed, regardless of the transaction fee. Otherwise 0.1 mBTC is paid for every 1000 bytes of transaction (rounded up).

The priority of a transaction can be calculated by [1]

priority = sum(input_value_in_base_units * input_age) / size_in_bytes