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

[James Spenceley]

For a government, any investment that isn't funded by surplus cash is funded by debt, end of story.

The government calling it an "Investment" and taking it off balance sheet (i.e not including it in their deficit accounts) is exactly what Enron did, nobody notices when things are good.

--
James

Sent from my iPad

On 30/09/2012, at 5:00 PM, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
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