Australia’s first electronic communication network, the telephone service, was developed as a government monopoly, following the established model of the postal service. It included a modified idea of the postal cross subsidy (known as the ‘Universal Service Obligation’) that minimised the discrepancy between the cost of provision of services to customers in urban and rural settings. The telephone organisation, known as the PMG, then Telecom, was privatised and opened to competition between 1997 and 2006, and is now known as Telstra.
With the growth in digital communication in the latter part of the 20th
century, the demand for a dedicated digital communication network grew. Between 2002 and 2009 there were numbers of initiatives by government and the private sector, alone or in combination, to create such a network, but with no successful outcomes.
In April 2009, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, leader of the Labor government, announced the government’s intention to create a network to:
- Connect 90 per cent of all Australian homes, schools and workplaces with broadband services with speeds up to 100 megabits per second – 100 times faster than those currently used by many households and businesses.
- Connect all other premises in Australia with next generation wireless and satellite technologies that will deliver broadband speeds of 12 megabits per second.’[1]
And establish a company:
- ‘…jointly owned by the Government and the private sector [that] will invest up to $43 billion over 8 years to build the National Broadband Network’, [2]
the NBN.
From that time on, the project became a ‘political football’, the site of poorly informed but expedient political decisions and an issue at an election that changed the party of government. Now, a decade on, the NBN is approaching completion, with a scaled down ambition, a cost estimated to run to $74 billion to $84 billion and a completion date in the mid 2020s.
It is a story of the ascendency of sectional and illinformed political considerations over good engineering ones, and a conservative party’s hatred of another political party: one in which the exercise of political power over an essential media and communication development eclipsed national interest.
[1] http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;orderBy=d...
[2]
Ibid