blog In a new scathing commentary published this afternoon, ZDNet columnist David Braue rips the recent performance of Malcolm Turnbull as a flailing Shadow Communications Minister to shreds and leaves the mangled corpse behind in the dust. Probably the best paragraph in this cutting analysis:

“He is so focused on discrediting Labor’s rollout — which, slow as it may be, is in fact real and proceeding — that he has utterly failed to convince anybody that his alternative plan will work at all. When presented with entirely valid points about the obstacles in front of them, he simply shrugs them off as though they were irrelevant.”

I suspect that what is happening with Turnbull at the moment is that the Member for Wentworth has very rarely faced a political situation before where there are not two sides to the story. When it comes to the NBN’s technical underpinnings, the sheer facts of the matter are that Labor’s fibre to the premise-based vision is technically sounder and will deliver better services than any alternative the Coalition has been able to come up with.

Turnbull’s approach to this issue has been to turn on the charm and apply his charisma to the situation, as well as going deeper to research examples where a FTTN network could work. I suspect these skills have served him well in the past. But I don’t think they are helping him prevail against the sheer technical reality that ubiquitous fibre is the best long-term solution for Australia’s telecommunications needs. Sometimes there is no grey — sometimes things are black and white, and this seems to apply with respect to technology more than in many other fields.

Image credit: Office of Malcolm Turnbull