Politicians have a big problem when it comes to accepting good advice from people whom they deem to be on the other side of the fence.
Presumably it is this that prevented the Finance Minister Mathias Cormann from agreeing with telco veteran Bevan Slattery when the latter suggested that the government write down most of its investment in the national broadband network and lower access prices.
This, Slattery suggested to the AFR (paywall), would allow NBN Co to drop its prices and allow retail service providers to, in turn, lower theirs, so that people could take up higher speed subscriptions.
Which would achieve that which the NBN was meant to achieve: allow Australians to access the Internet using fast broadband - not fraudband of which there has been a copious supply Down Under for at least the last 20 years.
{loadposition sam08}Cormann, who has always made me wonder whether his face is made of wood, was not said to be very receptive to the idea.
But the man misses the point: the NBN was built so Australians could have faster broadband. Not slower broadband as is often becoming the case when people, more in hope than anything else, switch from their current ADSL service to the NBN and find that they have gone backwards.
One doesn't need any links for evidence of this; there are cases cropping up every single day. Indeed, there are some Australians who have been stuck without any service for weeks, after they gave up their old connections in the hope of attaining nirvana.
Suffice it to say that they did not even get close. Rather, they found that it is possible to be told by a corporation, the head of which draws $3.6 million a year, that they have to be without Internet access in a first world country because they are in the difficult category.
Something like the kindergarten kids who are told to wait until after school to be taught, because they are described using the same D-word.
Slattery knows what the issues are. Some of his suggestions to the AFR may be deemed to be somewhat self-seeking because he will benefit if they are adopted. But if Internet users benefit as well, then it is fine.
The problem we have is with people who make self-serving statements — and I can think of no better example of this than Malcolm Turnbull when he told us before the 2013 election that Labor's plan for the NBN would cost $90 billion — that turn out to benefit only them but ultimately prove to be false.
The government is generally silent on NBN issues these days, except when it can spruik the achievement of this target or that. It has more or less accepted that the national farce known as the NBN will have to be rebuilt once it is completed.
If Turnbull is not too bothered about it, this is because he knows he and his gang of neoliberals will be out of office by then. Labor will have to deal with the problems and we may well have a repeat of the whole episode — call it NBN Mark II — in the 2020s.