blog We were kind of stunned when the new Coalition Government in Victoria rejected the ‘opt-out’ approach to rolling out the National Broadband Network. After all, we thought … with the Federal Government paying for it and no real downside to having fibre rolled out everywhere, by default, what is there to possibly object to?

Following the state’s controversial choice — which industry representative body the AIIA slammed in public — we tried to get other states to comment on their own preferences. At the time those we contacted other states such as NSW to get their views on the matter, but couldn’t get them to comment. However, in yesterday’s Financial Review, the issue broke out into the public arena again:

“NSW Nationals leader Andrew Stoner has vowed to oppose automatic connection to the $35.9 billion project if elected, a position contradicted by state opposition spokesperson for financial management Greg Pearce.”

The guts of Stoner’s opposition to the opt-out option already being implemented by Tasmania appear to be Labor are crap and that people would have fibre to their house without asking for it. Wow. That sounds almost as sophisticated as Labor’s the Internet is full of dodgy material, let’s filter it at the ISP level argument. Some things just can’t be distilled down into a one sentence political message.

Needless to say, we hope common sense prevails here. It makes absolutely no sense to set up a multi-billion dollar National Broadband Network project and then rely on the common sense of the everyday property owner to have it installed. This thing needs to be more structured than that. Collecting millions upon millions of permission slips is a waste of time for NBN Co.

Image credit: Dane Munro, royalty free