Before the last election I wrote to Malcolm Turnbull, then Shadow Minister for Communications and proposing an alternative to a world standard fibre based NBN.
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Monday, February 25, 2013
Dear Mr. Turnbull,
I am old enough to remember the building of the Sydney Opera House. The conservative side of politics campaigned on and on about how it was a waste of money; how we could build whole suburbs in Western Sydney for what this white elephant was costing.
Askin and Hughes eventually got in (partly on that campaign), made it impossible for the genius architect to complete the project, drove him out of the country and bodgied up the interior.
There is no doubt that even the degraded building we got is almost the best money that NSW has ever spent. Its value to NSW and Australia as a whole is incalculable even though political vandalism undermined it.
We talk about refitting it now and trying to bring it back more to Utzen’s concept and these refurbishments are likely to cost more than the original construction. It was a case of short term parsimony for long term stupidity – we could have had a Rolls Royce and we got a Ford, which is still okay but …
Please, do not do the same thing to the NBN.
I hear the same arguments coming out about expense and how we can cut costs etc. and I fear that if you get control you will gerry up bits and pieces to get us a decent Commodore system of cables and wireless BUT in this case we can afford a Rolls Royce and long tern needs suggest that a Rolls Royce will stand us in much better stead than the jury rigged kind of system that you seem to have in mind.
Let’s for once get as much of the stuff as possible underground (where our electric cabling should probably be but that’s maybe a different story) and give us the best and fastest communications infrastructure possible.
Please don’t risk taking on the mantle of Davis Hughes and his gang of hired knaves as the guy who gave us a second rate communication system when we could have had world’s best.
His reply:
Tuesday, 26 February.
Thanks, we will deliver a network that does the job for a lot less money and time.
Despite attempts to conceal the truth we now know our future new network will be an expensive stop-gap and we don’t know when we’ll get it.
Mr Turnbull can’t build a network, can’t run a party but thinks he can run a country.
Corruption and cash
SARAH Ferguson’s program on ABC’s Four Corners on Monday evening confirmed that funding activities of the major parties are blackened by corruption.
Influence seems readily purchased, even by banned Developers and Development Companies, through the Liberal Party’s badly named Free Enterprise Foundation.
One interesting aspect on screen was Arthur Sinodinos’ ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ syndrome - a challenge to George Pell’s title for world’s worst memory.
There were some heroes: Constitutional Lawyer George Williams; George Watson (ICAC); Stephen Mayne (Crikey); Peter Phelps (NSW Liberal); Michael Yabsley (Liberal); Keith Mason, Chairman NSW Electoral Commission all calling for a National anti-corruption body to clean up political corruption in the Federal sphere.
The major parties seem resistant - why?