A post which promises, at some point, to be about the NBN.

Imagine a ball. In as much as I would like, in this story, for someone to be picking it up and this to be considered a legal move, imagine it is a rugby ball. Let's make it gray. With a red duck on it¹. Now let us imagine a game of rugby proceeding on a field around the ball. This game has become rather scrappy. So scrappy, in fact, that everyone has pretty much forgotten about the ball's existence in their determination to beat the crap out of anyone wearing different colours from them. Hell, some are even attacking even members of their own team with eye-gouging fury. I suppose I really could have just said it had descended into a brawl. I didn't, though, because I'm trying to be all evocative and shit. You O.K. with that, Mr 'Get the fuck on with the story'? Hey, man, fuck you.

Anyways, into this farcical scene steps a diminutive, bespectacled man in a suit. He makes his way over to the ball, dodging the odd fist, elbow and knee attached to various combatants who appear to be paying little attention to him. He stands over the ball, glances furtively in a number of directions then, tentatively, he picks the ball and holds it wonderingly for a while. He now has the power. He can decide the outcome of the game. With a new-found air of superiority and contempt he looks around him at a field of stupid, narrow-minded neanderthals in rugby uniforms who still haven't noticed that the kind of bespectacled nerd they used to beat up in high school has just taken control of their game. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and runs. So taken with the sheer joy of his situation he fails to notice the single nondescript tree standing just outside the playing field he has inadvertently plotted a course directly at. Again without anyone paying any attention to him, he runs directly into it with a soft, anti-climactic thud and falls unconscious on the ground. The ball rolls quietly away where it lies waiting......

Why, you may ask, did I bother with writing the above when I simply could have said that Chris Berg appears to have picked up the ball and run in a startlingly dumb and counter-intuitive direction with it? Not sure, really. Deal with it, buddy. He has, though.

In all the debate over the NBN centering on such matters as which side is right, who can be trusted in this election campaign and why are we doing this anyway ... an elephant, it seems to me, has been trying to hide in our room. That elephant is Mr Reginald Grey-Trunks the privatisation of Telstra. I'm surprised, especially given how depressing I found the whole affair at the time, that I'd forgotten about it. Thanks for bringing it up, Chris .... even if you are an idiot.

Let us assume that we may take his characterization of history as gospel:

But think back: just a few years ago Telstra was begging the government for permission to build its own super-fast broadband network. At no cost to taxpayers. Completely free of government subsidy. If the previous government² or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had allowed it, there's a good chance the private sector could have been building the broadband network already.

...............................................

There was a stickler of course. Telstra was asking for a regulatory holiday - that is, to exempt its new fibre investment, for a time, from the requirement to share it with its competitors.

So, faced with the rather bleak choice of allowing a private Telstra from building and owning the entire NBN, thus guaranteeing both the NBN's existence and a private monopoly over it, or risking having Telstra not build the NBN itself, but disallowing anti-competitive behavior - the latter was chosen. Disallowing a single private company from crushing all opposition is over-regulation in Chris Berg's world, and the fact that no NBN was built by any set of telcos was not a failure of the market, but of government. He makes some strange conclusions but he is, at the end of the day, a zealot devoted to a rather strange god so I suppose we must forgive him for being blind to a rather obvious conclusion that privatising Telstra, at least in the manner in which it was done³, was a terribly stupid idea without which the above bleak choice dissolves and we have a functional NBN already.

It was predicted at the time, for rather obvious reasons, that privatizing  Telstra meant cutting the public purse off from future profits, but not from future costs (i.e. that if we needed any major telecommunications infrastructure upgrades, we'd still have to pay for them ourselves and we'd still have to bail telcos out if they needed it, precisely because they provide an essential service we cannot do without), and there was never really any solid reasoning presented for the privatisation apart from a 'public bad, private good' mantra and a wide-eyed, salivating hypnotism with just how much that mother fucker could be sold for.  Realising that private monopolies are demonstrably not in the public interest (especially over essential services), Telstra may well have been forced to play with one hand behind its back post-privatisation, and this may well have been why they never leveraged their monopoly of old infrastructure to a monopoly of new infrastructure.... but the privatisation demonstrably screwed almost everybody. Telecommunications  development floundered - meaning the public lost out, share-holders lost out, and Telstra itself lost most of its value & is now a 2nd to 3rd rate telco.

Being temperamentally more of a Labour than Liberal voter myself, I was nonetheless finding it hard to find any good articulable reason why the ALP should be preferenced above the LNP apart from the fact that Abbott is a freakin' cunt, and that on climate change and asylum seekers the ALP have a rather forced hand,even if they're not really in practice distinguishable from the LNP at present, but I rather think that Chris has given me one. That we are now having this debate at all, and that the LNP seem to be the party that put us in this fucking mess in the first place and now don't seem to have any fucking idea how to fix it .... well, they really haven't as yet been punished enough for that yet.

Thanks again, Chris.


¹I like ducks

²The 'previous government' being, though being from the IPA Mr Berg can't bring himself to say it, the Howard government.

³You can, I think, make a case for separating the retail section of Telstra from its wholesale/infrastructure and privatising that alone.