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Much of the national broadband network issue probably went right over the heads of most voters in the past week. The timing of the Australian Federal Police raids on two Labor Party sites last week was perfect for the Coalition. The simple, popular view is that if you are raided by the 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, Labor 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 the leaking was happening. The answer is pretty plain: since 2013, the government, communications ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Mitch Fifield, and NBN Co have made a complete hash of the NBN, to the enormous economic and social cost of Australians. People working for NBN Co have inside knowledge of cost overruns, technology blunders and roll-out delays, and they feel the public has a right to know what's 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, sent in the wreckers. It couldn't bear the possibility that Labor might get credit for starting 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 huge 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, Turnbull 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's not being proved quicker in connecting households than the original. Tragically, it will not be cheaper. NBN has had to buy the copper wires, 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 federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne's comments on Monday. He said Australians didn't need the internet speeds that the original scheme would have delivered. The Coalition's plan (at best a quarter of 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 accepted the second-rate option: the cheap solution that costs more in the long run and makes our economy less competitive. On the global internet-speed table produced by world-recognised Akamai, we now sit at a lamentable 50th place and falling. We dropped six more places in the six months to March. Worse, it appears the Coalition is trying to ensure that a Labor government can't 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? (And dare we ask that royal commissions be called Australian commissions of inquiry instead?) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ 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 as we should construct one broadband network with fibre to the premises. After all, we only have one Snowy Mountains Scheme. crispinhull.com.au

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