Lack of NBN detail now outrageous

James Riley
Monday, 08 March 2010 21:08

Opinion and Analysis

The Rudd Government's 'trust me' approach to spending on its $43 billion National Broadband Network is starting to appear genuinely ridiculous.

When the project was first unveiled – on the back of a failed RFP process – it was universally hailed as good news for the tech industry, especially as its announcement coincided with a discussion paper that pointed the way to an overdue structural reform of the telecommunications sector.

The business community and broader public were broadly supportive of the plan, and certainly they were supportive enough to cut the Government some slack over the shocking lack of detail.

These days that broad support is starting to look thin.

This is indeed the biggest infrastructure project in the nation's history, as Government is fond of saying. What is far from clear is whether it will produce the biggest public spending nightmare in the nation’s history.

How would we know? The NBN has been the most under-scrutinised project we have ever seen in Australia.

And for the size of the planned spend of public money, the lack of publicly available detail on the project is without precedent.