If only the NBN were the Snowy Mountains Scheme

A LOT of the NBN issue has probably gone right over the heads of most voters in the past week. The timing of the AFP raids on two Labor Party locations last week was perfect for the Coalition. The simple popular view is that if you are raided by the Australian Federal Police you must have done something wrong.

Not so. I have been raided by the AFP over leaked documents. I did nothing wrong. As a journalist I was just the recipient of leaked documents, which is not a crime. The police were merely seeking evidence about a crime and the identity of the criminal – the person who did the leaking from the government.

To put it bluntly, the ALP was the leakee, not the leaker.

When I was raided (a long time ago), I said to the coppers something like: “Haven’t you got something better to do, like catch some real criminals doing real damage.”

The reply was all in the upward eye movement not in the “no comment” verbal response.

The real story here is not the chase for the “criminal leaker”, but why was the leaking happening. The answer to that is pretty plain: since 2013 the Government, Communications Ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Mitch Fifield, and the NBN have made a complete hash of the National Broadband Network to the enormous economic and social cost of the Australian people.

People working for NBN Co have inside knowledge of cost overruns, technology blunders and roll-out delays and feel that the public has a right to know what is going on.

They are obviously concerned that what was to be a great nation-building project is going off the rails.

Before the 2013 election, the Coalition, instead of taking a bipartisan, Snowy-Mountains-Scheme approach to the project, the Coalition sent in the wreckers. It could not bear the possibility that Labor might get credit for initiating the scheme. Incidentally, Labor initiated the Snowy Scheme, too, but Robert Menzies at least kept it going.

Labor planned to take fibre-optic cable with massive increases in internet speed right to the home or business. Turnbull, no doubt with riding instructions from the prime wrecker himself – then Prime Minister Tony Abbott – to demolish the plan in whatever way he could, came up with the plan to take fibre only to the node (the end of the street if you like) and use the existing copper wire from there to the premises.

It would be fast, cheaper and quicker, he asserted. NBN Co would be more businesslike and more transparent.

Wrong, on all five counts, and grievously wrong on the “cheaper” count.

Turnbull took an exciting, agile, innovative, nation-building project backwards to dull, slow-moving old technology, that is leaving us behind other nations.

A transparent NBN would not send in the police to chase whistleblowers with a very good cause to blow the whistle.

A more businesslike NBN would have recognised the economies of scale in building fibre to the premises and the business opportunities for future applications of high-speed internet.

The Turnbull scheme will not be very fast and certainly not faster than the original scheme.

It is not being proved quicker in connecting households than the original.

Tragically, it will not be cheaper. NBN has had to pay for the copper and the long-term costs of maintaining it will be higher than the cost of fibre to the premises. Copper corrodes. You need to replace it every 10 to 15 years.

As it happens, the documents leaked from NBN reveal severe cost blow-outs and delays. In short it will cost more for an inferior product delivered later.

The short-sightedness was best summed up by Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s comments on Monday. He said that Australians did not need the internet speeds to be delivered by the original scheme. The Coalition’s plan (at best a quarter the speed of Labor’s scheme) would enable five movies to be watched simultaneously. “Which is a lot of movies,” he said. “That’s a lot of televisions.”

But, stuck in the past, he ignored future uses. Remote surgery? Remote MRI and CAT scanning? Remote ECG? Who knows what else? And it could have been done for, as it turns out, the same or lower cost.

Instead, we have accepted the second-rate ¬ the cheap solution which costs more in the long run and makes our economy less competitive.

On the international internet speed table produced by world-recognised Akamai, we now sit at a lamentable 50 th and falling. We dropped six more places in the six months to March.

Worse, it appears that the Coalition is attempting to ensure a Labor Government cannot go back to the original scheme by signing very long-term contracts for its hybrid scheme.

And worse still, there is now new “thin” fibre technology, reducing the cost of fibre to the premises by as much as 30 per cent. We know this because the company rolling out New Zealand’s fibre-to-the-premises network came and told our Senate Committee looking at the matter – almost laughing at us. New Zealand has just overtaken Australia on the internet speed table.

Dare we ask for a Royal Commission? (Dare we ask that Royal Commissions be called Australian Commissions of Inquiry instead?)

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On the subject of communications and national networks, why is the Government promising $60 million to cover black spots in the mobile network.

Weren’t we told by successive Labor and Coalition Governments that market forces and privatised telecommunications networks would provide the best results for Australians?

Of course, we should have had one mobile network (owned publicly, privately or a mix) and as many (separately owned) competitive carriers as the system would bear.

Just like we should construct one broadband network with fibre to the premises.

After all, we only have one Snowy Mountains Scheme.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and Fairfax Media on 28 May 2016.