Sunday 31 March 2013

NBN Co - 'No Broadband Network'

The government election ads (oops - they're just 'informational' ads) about the NBN 'rollout' continue to irritate me. Ignoring the fact that the whole 'gold plated', inefficient and snafu-prone NBNCo process (sound like anything else the Labor government has implemented recently?) is way over-budget and behind schedule, when exactly will NBN come to our area? After all, its the rich (aka net 'tax-payers') that are funding the whole thing, so surely they should get some benefit, even if disadvantaged (ie. lots of the population on the dole or other government assistance) areas are intended to get it first?

Sure, we live in a 'blue-ribbon' Liberal seat, so despite assurances that the NBN rollout-schedule has been developed 'independantly' of government and has not been targeted at marginal Labor seats in western sydney (any correlation is pure coincidence, we're told), so I'm not surprised that we are can't expect to see NBN coming to our area any time soon. But, with a major new hospital due to be constructed in our area 'soon', I'd have expected a prospective rollout-date to at least be available on the NBNCo rollout plan website - after all, it says 'to find out when the NBN is coming to your place, enter your full address'. Instead, for our area, you get a 'not available' message, which obviously means that there's not even any prospective of the rollout starting here within the next 3 years, given there is a category for 'construction commences within three years' which apparently doesn't apply to our area.

Given the likely change of government in September, which may see the whole NBN scheme effectively abandoned (there are apparently much cheaper ways to achieve pretty much the same end result), the end result will probably be that taxpayers end up footing the bill for providing cheap, fast internet tv to low socio-economic areas and then have to pay to get fast broadband via some other means than NBNCO - much as they currently do?

This may have been Labor's plan all along - rollout NBN to key Labor areas to buy some more votes ('bread and circuses' for the masses) at taxpayer expense (aka stick it to the 'rich', or 'class warfare'), and then abandon the NBN scheme as 'unaffordable' before getting around to servicing most of the 'blue-ribbon' electorates. I can't see that the NBN is going to achieve much increase in national productivity (especially given recent moves away from 'telecommuting' by IT companies), so it will probably just end up shifting leisure time activity from viewing free-to-air TV to internet tv and movies-on-demand. Hardly a great allocation of the countries wealth.

Subscribe to Enough Wealth. Copyright 2006-2013

No comments: