The Go-Slow Government

NBN: Delivering On Their Promise To Make It 'Shit'

I've come to the conclusion this government likes to go slowly on things because too late or too little is better than nothing, but would never - ever - look progressive. And so, they came to power promising to cut the NBN so shreds, and now that they are 22months into government, they've delivered on that promise mightily.

The Singaporean company named as one of Telstra's biggest worries by its outgoing chief executive David Thodey has labelled parts of the $41 billion national broadband network as "shit" as it prepares to launch services in Australia. 

MyRepublic is a Singaporean internet start-up led by co-founder Malcolm Rodrigues that offers unlimited broadband at super-fast speeds for low prices. When asked about competition during his exit interviews, Mr Thodey said it was tier-three disrupters including MyRepublic that the company worried about more than TPG or Optus.

Now the disrupter is coming to Australia, having previously launched in New Zealand and Indonesia. Mr Rodrigues told Fairfax Media that MyRepublic will build a local team this year and launch services by mid-2016 with the goal of shaking up the entire broadband market. 

"We've kind of re-engineered the economics of telcos and this is what David Thodey was talking about," he said. "We're going to come in with an unlimited 100 megabit per second offer at the $80-$90 per month range. 

"We acquire customers at a fraction of the cost of incumbents, we [provide] service [to] those customers at a fraction of the cost and we don't churn."

Seriously! Who could have imagined that? But no, it sure wasn't this government that decided to dumb down and slow down the NBN to the point of being described as shit. Or was it?

Mr Rodrigues said he "loved the NBN" but that it had lost its way by moving onto fibre-to-the-node technology, which partly relies on slower copper phone lines to cut costs and save time. His company benefits from networks that operate on one foundation technology. 

The Coalition ordered the change after Labor's NBN rollout hit major construction problems and delays. But Mr Rodrigues claimed FTTN reliance on copper would see it deliver slower speeds than promised – a claim the government strongly denies. 

"I don't know what [the government] is doing on the other policy fronts but on this they've completely stuffed it," he said. "More and more Australians will leave the country looking for jobs and you'll continue to be a resource based economy – the hope of building IT jobs and a digital economy will kind of be more difficult to achieve. 

"On FTTN we'll market 100Mbps and when people come over we'll say 'sorry, thank your government [because] you're on a shit network and the most you can get is 20-30Mbps, but we will continue to lobby your government to turn it into a fibre-to-the-home one and as soon as you get there we'll get you a free upgrade to fibre'."
Mr Rodrigues said the NBN was clearly gaining momentum and would eventually find its way. But he was also adamant that Australia would fall behind if 50Mbps by 2020 was used as the national internet benchmark. 

"We want to turn Indonesia into a digital nation – I want to start stealing jobs from Australia and have people come do it out of that market," he said. 

He said the Federal Government would've been better off focussing on key markets and extending the timeline for building the NBN, which has been underway since 2009. 

"What they should've said is that this would be a 20 year rollout rather than a 10 year rollout and focussed on building FTTH into the key markets and continued to push that," he said. "I'd even be okay with the current approach if they said this was phase 1 and that phase 2 would be to move the FTTN guys to FTTH [as part of the plan]."

The mind boggles at just how big a stuff up this has been - all because Tony Abbott and the Slow-a-lition wanted to gut the NBN to help their crony friends at Telstra when it fact doing so did not help their long term competitiveness in the least bit. You never would have guessed the NBN was the crucial policy element in the last Federal election but people obviously missed it and voted for the guy determined to make it a shittier network. I guess now they got what they wanted.

Our Emission Reductions Will Go Slower Than Yours

And here is the dreaded announcement involving the emissions target. The PM of dumb says we're aiming for a 26% reduction by 2030.

The highly anticipated target based on 2005 levels would leave Australia trailing the international pack on emissions cuts beyond 2020, despite being among the worst greenhouse gas polluters per capita in the Western world.

The proposed figure of 26 to 28 per cent is well below the more ambitious effort climate experts say is needed to limit warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avert the worst climate changes.

However Mr Abbott said the government's focus was always on growth and jobs, and the pledge was a "good, solid economically responsible, environmentally responsible target".  

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who will lead the Australian delegation at the crucial Paris climate talks this year, said the target was ambitious and the nation was "doing our bit".

Sure thing Jules! Sure thing Greg! Sure we're doing our bit if you count jogging on the spot and working a sweat as getting to the destination. It's more accurate to say, we're going as slow as we can on this so that we look like we're going something, but we're doing the bare minimum by which we could be judged to be doing something. Anything less and really, we'd be doing nothing at all.

The reaction to the announcement has been negative in the same way that a chorus of disapproval erupts when you ask people to make a sacrifice for very little return. It's not morally or ethically sound, it's not even economically sound, but Tony Abbott & Co. are busily strapping the future Australia on the mast of the good ship coal industry as it sails into the worst commodity storm this century. Yeah, it's more foolhardy than brave, but that's the idiot we've got handling the boat.

The headline here looks hysterical except, the circumstances themselves are hysterical, so I don't think it's worth grousing about the hysteria. It's true, Tony Abbott is going to have to apologise to his children for not doing enough. But in some ways the problem is already here and unfolding quicker thane can say "carbon dioxide emissions", so there's not much point haranguing the Prime Minister. He knows he's fucking it up, and fucking it up big time at that. The truth is, he doesn't fucking care, so, there!