blog Simon Hackett’s dropped a little below the radar recently, after selling the pioneering ISP he founded to the iiBorg. Oh, he’s got his side projects — his Tesla electric cars, his own light aircraft, his new technology startup incubator in Adelaide. However, we suspect the Internode founder has a little more time on his hands than he used to. For these, and many other reasons, your writer would humbly submit to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull that Hackett would make an ideal appointee to the refreshed board of NBN Co. My full arguments on the subject are (paywalled) at Delimiter 2.0 today. A sample paragraph:

“If Malcolm Turnbull is serious about making sure all Australians quickly get access to affordable, high-speed broadband, there is one man he must consider appointing to the board of NBN Co: The entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing Australians broadband in the first place. Australia’s own Gordon Freeman; a giant who looms large in the telecommunications annals; an outside-the-box innovator; the thinking man’s NBN board director. Internode founder Simon Hackett.”

You can easily imagine Hackett catching a brief plane flight from Adelaide to Sydney for the regular NBN board meetings, and then driving one of his several Tesla machines from Kingsford-Smith down to NBN Co’s North Sydney headquarters. And Hackett’s appointment would provide a fantastic degree of balance to a board which most people currently expect to be dominated by former executives from giants like Telstra and Optus. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in a board meeting attended by both Hackett and Ziggy Switkowski. Now that would be entertainment. One guess as to which one of the pair would have more of an idea what they were talking about.

Image credit: Internode