nothing to hide?

Opinion piece from The Australian. No doubt plans are being hatched to dangle (tax payer funded) carrots in front of News Ltd to neuter their opionions.


Nothing to hide? Let's see the broadband report From: The Australian March 18, 2010 12:00AM

Stephen Conroy muddies the waters by withholding study
IT'S not the chook raffles we need to worry about when it comes to the Rudd government. Its appalling effort at installing insulation in Australian homes is evidence of Labor's lack of organisational talent. Which is why Communications Minister Stephen Conroy should immediately release the implementation study for the national broadband network. The absence of a business plan for this $43 billion project insults taxpayers and does nothing to generate confidence that the government knows what it is doing. Releasing the report for which KPMG and McKinsey have been paid $25 million would help. At 500 pages, it promises more depth than the flimsy CSIRO document that Senator Conroy used to justify the NBN last year. That document reportedly drew on the well-known information source Wikipedia for some of its content.

The most generous appraisal of the NBN project is that it is a bit of a mess. Almost a year after the announcement of a mega-network to ensure our future in the digital age, Australians have little idea how it will operate, which private investors will be involved and, most importantly, where the money will come from.

Better broadband is a good idea with potential to increase national GDP and help Australia compete more effectively in a global economy. It is an important part of the government's strategy to break up the monolithic and outdated Telstra structure, which has dogged our telecommunications for two decades. But with the Telstra legislation delayed in the Senate and the government failing to strike a deal with the telco over the price of key assets it wants for the NBN, Canberra's plan looks more than a little shaky. Senator Conroy is not helping by insisting he needs more time to consider the 500-page implementation and viability report. The NBN has always suffered from its "back of the envelope" origins and withholding the report just makes it look as if the government is worried about its findings. Transparency is essential in this portfolio, given the billions at stake in the telco sector. Yet transparency is not Senator Conroy's strongest suit, as demonstrated by his action in cutting free-to-air TV licences by $250 million but only announcing it when he knew this newspaper was on to the story.

The minister has also failed to explain who will fund the NBN, although the government argues only a "fraction" of the $43 billion will come from the public purse with the NBN using private equity and borrowing off its own balance sheet. That's good, given the debt we're in thanks to the government's massive stimulus spending on home insulation and school halls. But the claim would be more credible if we knew how the network will be put together.

Australians need evidence that while the government may play a role in kickstarting the project, market forces will determine the scale and price of the infrastructure. We need a business plan that shows the NBN is a genuine commercial proposition, not merely a corporation needing taxpayers' money to survive. It would be a disaster if we saw a repeat of the 1990s exercise when Telstra's predecessor, Telecom, was merged with OTC to form the "megacom" that stultified our telco development. Senator Conroy needs to do better this time around.