Opposition air-swings over the NBN
Attacking the cost to the taxpayer may win over a few conservatives, but I have little doubt that the NBN is and will remain a broadly popular move.
A few days ago Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said that he actually expects the new national fibre network to cost the taxpayer far less than the $43 billion originally quoted, and that the fibre coverage may be more extensive than originally anticipated, reaching into towns with less than 1000 citizens.
He said that in a worst-case scenario, the federal government might be on the hook for $22 billion, with the rest to be made up by private funding in the new company.
Conroy was probably responding to increasingly strident attacks by the opposition over the cost of the proposed network. Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin in particular has been demanding that the network be proven commercially viable before the government goes ahead and builds it. He has described the government’s current plan as reckless.
In between attacks on the cost, viability and public desire for the network, Minchin has occasionally taken time out from attacking the cost of the plan to attacking its proposed fibre coverage.
The opposition party sees no apparent contradiction in simultaneously criticising the cost of the fibre network and complaining that regional areas are not going to be as well served by it as city areas.
Yes, towns with less than 1000 people are likely to be stuck with 12mbps wireless, which is pretty sucky compared to 100mbps fibre, but it’s almost certainly better than they have now. And the reason they are only going to get wireless? It’s too expensive to roll out fibre everywhere.
Of course, on the latter complaint, it’s all about politics. Glenn Milne cleanly sums up the electoral politics in The Australian – and it’s pretty clear that rural voters aren’t unhappy with the NBN – they just want a better slice of it.
(As an aside, former Communications Minister Richard Alston also has an opinion column in The Australian on the competitive telecoms market with the NBN in play, although I’m not really sure what he’s arguing for or against – though perhaps that’s because the headline appears to be somewhat at odds with the article. Truth be told, I was never really sure what he was for when was Communications Minister, either.)
All in all, I think the Coalition are on a hiding-to-nothing in opposing the NBN. Attacking the cost to the taxpayer may win over a few small-government fiscal conservatives, and criticising rural coverage may rile up the some of the National Party’s base, but I have little doubt that the NBN is and will remain a broadly popular move, especially because it lifts Telstra’s stranglehold on Australian Telecommunications.
More to the point, it’s about building a network for Australia’s future. The point of the NBN is not to make a profit centre for the government – it’s to make a network that will take us into the next century, and that will carry all forms of communications traffic, not just consumer Internet access.
When you consider that our copper network has been in operation for over a hundred years, 1 or 2% of the federal budget over the next eight years doesn’t seem that unreasonable a cost for a network that could conceivably last just as long as our current PSTN.
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Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Comments: 1
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gnome
May 2, 2009 7:29 PM
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Hmmm, Senator Minchin. Isn't he the one who contributed to the present mess by insisting that Telstra had to be sold with the monopoly network in place, because it would be worth more as a monopoly?
Anyone who understands comms policy (that excludes most communications politicians for the last twenty years) knows that the NBN proposal is a vital and visionary piece of national infrastructure. If Senator Minchin wanted to be useful, he could start making some constructive suggestions about the rollout, starting now. |