[AusNOG] News: Minister Conroy contemplating Government-Fundedundersea cable?

[Mark Newton]

On 30/09/2012, at 11:15 AM, Tim McCullagh <technical at halenet.com.au> wrote:

> Mark with all due respect I would suggest you stop believing the government spin

If you think I'm being taken in by government spin, then perhaps you haven't been 
reading anything else I've ever written about this stuff.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of the NBN, it is inarguable that the Government's
current plan is to finance it by means of an investment, not debt;  and the Queensland
councils who want to build a fibre network from nowhere to nowhere in the middle of
nowhere want to do it with debt, not as an investment.

Lets also pause briefly to consider the magnitude of numbers we're talking about.
Lets say the NBN costs $50b, roughly twice what the Govt is currently saying their
capital contribution will be.

Sounds like a big scary number, because we don't often think in terms of billions.
To what can we compare it, to gain a sense of understanding about its magnitude?

Pretty much any major defence procurement, I reckon.  For instance, the Howard Government
thought we should spend $36b on 12 submarines to replace our 6 Collins Class boats (so
there's an NBN worth of expenditure right there), and also that we should spend another
$23b or so on 100 F-35 JSFs (which are heavy, late and slow, and supported by no strategy
to explain why we'd need 100 of them, and despite the fact that it's 2012 and we originally
ordered 2008 delivery, we still haven't received one to try out to see if they'll meet
our specifications)

So there's more than $50b right there, on a couple of white-elephants.

Could also compare it to something that's actually useful like hospital expenditure,
by pointing out that the entire 15 year construction cycle, including a moderately
large fudge-factor for cost blowouts, will come out at less than half of the $121
billion the government spent on health in 2009-10 alone.

And unlike the military procurement budget and the health budget, the govt plans
to get its capital back when it privatises the NBN later (whether it actually will
might be some cause for debate, but not a debate that'll make any meaningful difference
to whether the cost of building it is a big number)

On the scale of spending the Commonwealth Government often undertakes, it's chicken
feed.

If criticising the NBN on cost grounds is the best you've got, you've lost the
argument.  If you want to oppose it, you can probably find more effective ways
than that.  For example, you could perhaps start by asking yourself, "How come,
despite two parliamentary terms of boosterism, there are no ALP members (including
Conroy himself) who can credibly explain what our society will be able to do with
the NBN that we can't already do without it?" or, "In this debate that the
Government has characterised almost exclusively as being about speed and the
importance of 100Mbps-to-1Gbps into everyone's house, why are they proposing that
12 Mbps is not merely sufficient for country users, but is actually the best 
they'll ever get?"


  - mark