26 January 2009
When 2008 ended many Australians realised they had been conned by the Rudd Government on broadband.
During the last election campaign Labor promised to wave a magic wand, in the form of a taxpayer contribution of $4.7 billion, to deliver new, affordable, lightning speed broadband services, via fibre, to 98 per cent of the population.
By the end of last year construction of the so-called National Broadband Network (NBN) was to have commenced and the first new services were to come online soon after. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy made it all sound so easy.
Yet here we are in 2009 and Labor is yet to even select a network builder, let alone start construction. The way this process has been mishandled it would come as no surprise if roll out does not commence for many months, if at all.
In fact many industry experts believe the tender process is so fatally flawed that Labor should abandon it altogether. This also remains a distinct possibility.
Strangely, the only major broadband decision Labor has made was to cancel the Coalition's rural and regional broadband project OPEL. This would have delivered metro-equivalent broadband services to more than 500,000 under serviced premises across Australia.
Unlike Labor's NBN project, with a completion time of five and more likely eight years, the OPEL project was targeted for completion by mid 2009. Scrapped by the Rudd Government, with no alternative to it.
In relation to Labor’s broadband approach, there is simply no justification to spend $4.7 billion of taxpayers' money on replicating high-speed broadband services in metropolitan areas where the private sector is already delivering them.
Any taxpayer spend on broadband should be appropriately targeted at those areas where the market is failing. That was the guiding principle behind OPEL, which would have seen the Commonwealth target $958 million at disadvantaged regions.
Despite all the big promises from Labor, the reality is it has delivered nothing thus far on broadband and if the troubled NBN process continues in its current vein, the Rudd Government will be forced back to the drawing board.