It was infrastructure. Like the highways and railroads which bind up the continent. Like the ports which allow us to ship massive mega-tonnages of trade overseas. Like the old telephone wires which once upon a time served to collapse the distances which would otherwise have made living in such a vast, thinly populated land a sort of tyranny.

It was a great idea.

And it could have been one of those ideas which was legitimately subject to political debate over the best way to deliver the project and its benefits. Malcom Turnbull, who once thought it was a great idea too, could doubtless have made a compelling case for private industry to build out the platform and then to compete in its utilisation. Surely the ALP had somebody who could argue a contrary case for the commonwealth to provide the infrastructure, which would then be used by private interests as they saw best.

Instead, what we got was a decade-long shit show. A Rudd Labor government which had one good idea, and not a single clue about how to even explain it, let alone build the thing. And a violently ignorant wrecker in Tony Abbott, who saw nothing more than a chance to tear something down so that he could be king of the wreckage.

The press gallery was complicit in this failure of political leadership because it never did the work of investigating and explaining what an NBN truly was. (And again, it’s not just a goddamned internet provider!) Our tech journos wrote hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories explaining and predicting exactly what was going to happen with the NBN. But the mainstream media ignored them. Politicians abused and bullied them. They were just geeks.