While the government goes to pieces over marriage equality, some holding operations have become necessary on two other major fronts, both of which, in normal circumstances, would be significant medium-term problems.
One is the NBN. The government is now facing the consequences of its decision to wreck the project by switching to Fibre To The Node/Fibre To The Some Other Random Point Short Of Your Premises where it could, and using handpicked consultants, handpicked board members and handpicked executives to oversee the debacle. Malcolm Turnbull owns the whole project now, which after four years can no longer be blamed on Labor.
As CEO Bill Morrow noted, it’s inevitable that there would be a rising tide of complaints as more and more people switched over. But the unedifying sight of Morrow trying to blame massive consumer disgruntlement with their new NBN services on ISPs was never going to fly. Who are you going to believe, your ISP or a company that’s already a byword for the degradation of major nation-building project? And while residential users will be more numerous, it’s business users that have the most to lose from this mega-bungle as phones turn off, the internet isn’t available and upload and download speeds constrain business.
Sensing how bad the spat between Morrow and ISPs looked, the government intervened to flick the whole shambles to the communications regulator ACMA for investigation. Meantime, the steady drip of stories about rotten NBN experiences will continue, from the people who switch over to the NBN and discover they have no phone or internet for weeks to the people being forcibly moved from perfectly good HFC networks to the NBN and experiencing a dramatic slowdown in speeds. And NBN Co, where the first instinct is to aggressively attack critics (or call in the Federal Police to go after them) won’t make things any easier for the government.
The slowly unfolding story of the NSW government’s role, and that of both the NSW and federal Nationals, in undermining the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, is the second serious front that’s opened up against the government and it, too, has been dispatched to a review — although not a sufficiently independent for the liking of the South Australians.
Make no mistake, this has the potential for real damage as more detail emerges from NSW, and about Barnaby Joyce’s handling of it all. Significantly, rather than running protection for the Coalition, News Corp’s Sydney tabloid has leapt into the fray, following the lead of the ABC, to air damaging allegations about the enthusiasm of the Nationals to do the bidding of irrigators — to the extent that irrigators and the Nationals are meaningfully separate entities. The issue has now come a lot closer to Barnaby Joyce after the Financial Review’s Phil Coorey claimed a scalp overnight: one of Joyce’s nominees to the board of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority withdrew after questions about her participation in, and statements during, that teleconference, in which NSW Primary Industries deputy Gavin Hanlon offered de-identified departmental documents to irrigator lobbyists. The nominee is, it’s perhaps superfluous to note, a former National Party staffer.
[Rundle: the Murray-Darling furore epitomises the failure of right-wing politics]
Remember that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is supposed to be bipartisan and federal-state agreement. The Nationals, however, have always bitterly resented it, particularly in relation to water buybacks, and were only bought off with the wasting of hundreds of millions of dollars on inefficient water infrastructure bribes to irrigators. The removal of Tony Abbott proved to be an opportunity for the Nationals to sabotage the plan from within, by demanding that Malcolm Turnbull agree to move water from the environment portfolio into Barnaby Joyce’s Agriculture Department. Liberal MPs at the time expressed concern about Joyce having control of water, and those concerns have now been vindicated. The Nationals, state and federally, have been undermining the plan in the interests of irrigators, and at the expense of South Australia.
Following the initial Four Corners revelations, Joyce, allegedly “the best retail politician in Australia”, promptly boasted of controlling water and dismissed industrial-scale water diversion by NSW irrigators as trivial, infuriating the South Australians. So another review was ordered to shut the issue down, this time by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority itself, which is in Joyce’s portfolio. Cue demands for an independent inquiry, which are still ongoing.
The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister are personally neck-deep in the NBN and water issues. Both are the result of political fixes on major issues that have come badly unstuck. In neither case is a mere review going to fix things. If the government wasn’t about to rip itself apart on marriage equality, things would be serious.
Karma’s a bitch.
The government deserves all the pain it’s receiving re its nobbling of the NBN. The entire point of the NBN was, surely, to increase minimum Internet speeds. As people find they’re paying the same for a less reliable service, they’re entitled to be angry.
turnbull took over a rolls royce NBN and put a mini minor engine in it, he deserves the fate that will befall him, he`s just a lackey to the illiterates of the mad right, ideologically, not policy driven fools, in this circus turnbull is the head clown.
Indeed . . .
Turnbull bears the NBN shame 100% – he followed the destructive orders of a fool (Abbott) & transformed Rudd’s excellent NBN into a third rate mess. Perhaps Turnbull should’ve been renamed the Minister for Uncommunications. I still can hear the cries of the LNP back during the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd era, castigating Labor for the expensive & slow roll-out. With hindsight, it was slow because it was being implemented carefully & correctly.
Watching this particular chicken come home to roost is bitter-sweet.
“castigating Labor for the expensive & slow roll-out. ”
Given that Turnbull’s “faster,sooner,cheaper” model is none of that, but is costing just as much as the FTTP rollout was projected, and it not being completed any sooner – every one of the things Turnbull said his MTM would be, it isn’t.
Turnbull’s “faster, sooner, cheaper” model is costing a lot more than Labor’s FTTP model was projected to cost. More money for an inferior product that was obsolete before they began to roll it out!
In a previous work environment that was extended to “faster, cheaper, sooner – choose any two. Even that now seem optimistic.
No hindsight required. Always remember that what politicians say is unlikely to resemble facts or truth. They just said it was slow. Doesn’t mean it was. They managed to cast “expensive” as a pejorative, when it would actually have been worth it at twice the cost. The best one was Turnbull’s throw-away line about how he expected new (unspecified) technologies would turn up during the life of the project to bring prices down because …. well, because. Really? A new technology to out-perform fibre? Whatever Turnbull was in the past, he hasn’t been for a long time now.
Well said!
Turnbull is 100% responsible for the NBN debacle. He deserves to be remembered by history as the politician who wasted 10’s of billions of dollars of tax payer money purely for spite.
I agree Bjb!