Hey, where's my $450,000 NBN job?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 11 February 2010 09:34

Opinion and Analysis

Can you believe the crazy amounts of money being paid to employees of the NBN Co, where the top dog gets a whopping $1.95 million and one of his lieutenants, shamed in a vote rorting scandal, gets nearly half a million dollars per year?

When you start wondering whether the politicians are in it for us, the people, or in it for themselves and their mates with huge salaries and massive boondoggles that cost tens of billions of dollars, you have to start questioning who the system is really working for.

The story involves Mike Quigley, the chief executive of the Federal Government's NBN Co, the company that is setting up a wholesale broadband network, another Mike called Mike Kaiser, the who was forced out of the Queensland Parliament in 2001 because of a vote rorting scheme, the Prime Minister of the country, Kevin Rudd, and the Federal Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy.

In Australia, a scandal is erupting that only few really seemed concerned about. To start with, Australia's PM Rudd promised during the last election that he would deliver a 'national broadband network' delivering 12Mbps to 98% of Australians, with a government injection of $4.7 billion.

When $30 million tender process collapsed to see who could build such a network, delivering nothing but an expenses bill, Australia's PM and Communications Minister crafted a new plan on a 45 minute plane trip between Sydney and Canberra, and shocked the nation, the world and even recently, the OECD, with a plan so outrageous it would stun most into silence.

The plan was now to spend a mind-boggling $43 billion dollars - more than double what the previous Government left the country as a budgetary surplus - on a broadband network that would take years to deliver - and would likely be out of date by the time it arrives, given the incredible progress with wireless technologies and other undoubted advances in wired technology to come.

Now we learn that a Queensland 'public servant' and politician, the aforementioned Mike Kaiser, who was involved in a vote rorting scandal that saw him leaving parliament in shame and disgrace, had successfully lobbied the PM and the Communications Minister to get a $450,000 job with the NBN Co - without seemingly anyone else being considered according to recent reports on the matter.

How can someone who rorted the system be given such an important and high paying job in what is now one of Australia's most important companies? In case anyone thinks this is an ideological rant, this is not - whatever side of politics you're on, whether this was being done by a Labor or Liberal government, this is an outrage!

Continued on page 2, please read on...