Stephen Conroy held a press conference outside in the Senate courtyard at 5pm yesterday to talk about the national broadband network bids. On his way over, he stopped and chatted briefly with David Quilty, Telstra’s “Group Managing Director, Public Policy and Communications”. The assembled media saw it, and you might have spotted it on ABC News’s report. Quilty has been with Telstra for a while but he used to be John Howard’s Cabinet advisor and, before that, he was Richard Alston’s chief of staff.
Not the best look, stopping to shoot the breeze with Telstra’s chief lobbyist immediately before talking to the media about how Telstra’s broadband “bid” would be considered like everyone else’s by the Government’s “expert panel.”
The panel is made up of Communications Secretary Patricia Scott, John Wylie of Lazard Carnegie Wylie; Allphones Chairman Tony Mitchell; Professor Rod Tucker, Professor Reg Coutts; former Australian Communications Authority Chairman Tony Shaw; and Ken Henry.
Considering the Telstra bid shouldn’t take long because it’s non-compliant. The Request for Proposal requires coverage of 98% of the population. You could bid for a one area, like Transact did for the ACT, or you can bid for the whole lot. You can’t bid for 90%. Out it goes. That should be the end of the matter.
Will it work out that way? Well, this is what Telstra did under the previous Government’s rural broadband program. It deliberately submitted a noncompliant bid and then tried to mire the program in litigation when the Government awarded the contract to the compliant OPEL bid. It lost in court — lost badly — but not before it had slowed the program down sufficient that it could be killed off by the incoming Labor Government. Conroy cancelled the OPEL contract on the alleged grounds of non-performance earlier this year.
Thuggish and wholly amoral? Well, that’s Telstra.
Nick Minchin is right in predicting that there’ll be more litigation from Telstra — or its competitors — before this is over. The Department of Communications has probably spent millions on having probity advisers and lawyers poring over every syllable of the tender documentation and parsing every word uttered in discussions between the parties. No Commonwealth procurement happens these days without probity advisers vetting absolutely everything, and the sensitivity and size of this procurement would’ve meant everything would’ve been double-checked. It won’t be enough to stop a lawyer fest.
Minchin said yesterday that he felt sorry for Conroy — perhaps the first person to utter those words in many years. Minchin was referring to Conroy having to implement a dud policy — the $4.7b allocated by the Government for the network is unlikely to be enough. He was also given an absurd timeframe in which to implement it. On the Government’s original timetable, the first cable should have been being rolled out around now. That’s probably a year off and possibly much longer.
If Conroy really wants to get the National Broadband Network going he should stop shilly-shallying around with lawyers and telecommunications providers and go back to his old factional warfare days. Go down to a local soccer club in Melbourne, promise an ALP membership for every kilometer of cable laid, and sign up people to start doing it branch-stacking style. Get a race going between different ethnic communities to see who can roll out fastest. It could secure high-speed internet access for Australians AND the grip of the Right on the ALP for years to come.
Instead, no one’s likely to get any broadband for ages. Especially not in the bush, thanks to Conroy killing off the OPEL contract in a decision that will increasingly look wrong-headed and premature as time goes by.
There is only one solution and that is to have the Broad Band infrastructure owned by a Federal Enterprise. This not socialism, but the only practical approach where the tyranny of distance prevents the application of usual commercial practise.
The Federal enterprise should be empowered to buy back Telstra’s infra-structure and build on it to develop world class facilities; that could let at commercial rates to all private carriers.
Telstra under the 3 amigos will never allow true competition in the market. yet the reality is that that only Telstra has the skill resources to build the new structure. Telstra must be divested of it’s infrastructure.
Like wise the public deserves 99.9 % coverage at competitive rates and this can only be guaranteed where the cost of the infrastructure is recovered from equally competing service providers, not one provider like Singtel or Telstra controlling the service.
Quoting Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane “The Request for Proposal requires coverage of 98% of the population”.
Not quite. My quick reading of the RFP documents indicates that this is just one of the “Commonwealth’s objectives for the NBN” and not a requirement. There is ample “wriggle room” later on in the document for the Commonwealth and its advisors to consider and accept any proposal for implementation of the NBN should they choose to do so. The submission requirements are that proponents state “the extent to which the proposal meets the Commonwealth’s objectives for the NBN Project (clause 1.3 of Part 1).” Later on the documents clearly indicate that “proposals will be evaluated to identify the Proposal or Proposals that represent the best value for money on the basis of the evaluation criteria” – none of which directly quote the 98% coverage figure.
In any case, simply discarding a proposal for such a significant project without careful consideration of the content, and purely on the basis of its alleged “non-compliance”, would offend a number of probity principles including the “preservation of objectivity in seeking an efficient outcome in a procurement”.
Disclosure: Writer is a Telstra BigPond Dealer.
Its amusing Minchin feels sorry for Conroy, I doubt Minchin feels sorry for anyone or anything. Conroy is the worst performer of any Minister and while may be the patsy for the Govts broadband fiasco he has never sounded in control and his answers to the Opposition in the Senate yesterday were nothing short of an excercise in incompetence. Time and again he had to seek advise from his experts and even had to admit some answers were not available. All in all it was shoddy and will not endear him to his boss. He also has a battle on his hands with his attempts to censor the internet. There is a groundswell of opposition to his plans coming from all directions, not because there is a desire to support child pornography, but the bloody minded way he is going about it. This I feel is one battle the Govt has lost even now.
I still can’t understand why the Govt hasn’t gone after Telstra harder.
Conroy’s spent the last year, ducking and weaving while refusing to
admit that an 800 kg gorilla has him by the throat.
It’s embarrassing to watch and we can only hope that he and Garrett
will be the first Rudd ministers to be taken out the back and shot.
Telstra needs a real heavyweight to deal with it in a truly merciless fashion.
The sort of bare knuckle stuff that one could imagine Julia Gillard or John Falkner handing out.
I mean really…..It’s not like the public is even *slightly* fond of Sol or his
band of thuggish spin doctors. The Govt needs to twist Barnaby Joyce’s arm, get the country MPs onside and go after Telstra in the parliament.
I agree with Miker. Split Telstra into retail and wholesale – as should have been done at the outset – put the wholesale division into government hands, and Sol Trujillo and his monopolistic mates can go whistle.