James Riley
Tuesday, 17 August 2010 10:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The Nationals have done their rural and regional constituent base a huge disservice by supporting a Coalition policy that would dismantle the Government's National Broadband Network. And its Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce knows this better than anyone.
Even accounting for Senator Joyce's characteristic bluff and bluster, the undisciplined spray Barnaby directed at Stephen Conroy’s NBN and the government's ability to deliver high-speed national fibre to a timetable was simply jaw-dropping, a study in nonsense.
Labor's NBN will deliver far better outcomes for regional Australia – far, far better – than the Coalition's cobbled-together collection of half measures. Senator Joyce knows this.
Julia Gillard's health announcement yesterday, in which she created the means for doctors and specialists to start online consultations for people in areas where there are shortages of health care professionals, has neatly wedged the Nationals. Of course, regional Australia will be the chief beneficiaries of the health announcement, just as they will be in a raft of other broadband-enabled service areas.
As night follows day, Barnaby came out swinging. Air swings. Lots of air swings. Just awful to watch
The NBN plan must have been authored by a poor pretender to Hans Christian Andersen, he said. The NBN was like building and delivering a Maserati to 93 per cent of Australians, he said. The Tasmanian NBN has cost $500,000 per household, he said.
Barnaby was elected at the late 2004 poll and entered the Senate in mid-2005. During the intervening period he was neck deep with NSW Nationals Senator Fiona Nash in a whitepaper on telecommunications policy that was written in conjunction with the party's Page Research centre.
Barnaby and Fiona unveiled the Page finding and recommendations with much fanfare and a pig's arse chance of ever being implemented in a Howard government at a press conference at Parliament House.
Page's top-line recommendation was to build a national fibre optic network. It also sought the structural reform of the telecommunications sector, in recognition of the crippling lack of competition for services in the bush.
Barnaby was not tangential to this paper. He was all over it. He helped write the Page recommendations for government intervention on a grand scale to address market failure. It was dubbed the "Glass Snowy," a nation building program of proudly agrarian socialist proportions.
And it was ignored by the Liberals, who were – and still are – living in a world of denial about the market's continued failure in large swathes of the telecommunications sector. And in mistakenly thinking they can kick-start the market by tinkering with regulatory levers.
To see the Nationals now argue for the dismantling of their unrealised dream is extremely disheartening. All for the sake of Coalition unity under Tony Abbott. This sell out might have looked OK last year when the Coalition was simply trying to avoid a massacre, but its not a pretty look now.
The Nationals need to come clean about this. Regional telecommunications is held up as a die-in-a-ditch issue for the party and yet here we are.
Having dismantled Malcolm Turnbull's leadership last year through its implacable opposition to the emissions trading scheme – a hugely successful campaign that very nearly blew the Coalition apart – the Nationals fell into lock-step behind new leader Tony Abbott.
Yet the Coalition was in such a fractured state by the time Turnbull was dumped, they feared an election rout if there were any more fundamental policy revolts.
So they supported the Abbott oppositionism on everything related to the NBN – including the much needed competition reforms for the sector.
