Even with the benefit of hindsight, Helen Coonan can’t see any errors in her
government’s approach to telecommunications policy – confirming that any
vision she may have had was certainly very blurry.

In this vein, it is not surprising to read in her interview with CommsDay
this week that she doesn’t think there is a need for a $4.7 billion
contribution to a National Broadband Network (NBN). She would clearly favour
a patchwork of piecemeal programs that have very little to show for
themselves.

According to Senator Coonan, the Howard Government had a “comprehensive
approach to blanketing the country with broadband” a wistful reference to
the pork-barrel politics that characterised her government’s venal approach
to public policy.

Over the years, billions of dollars where thrown at community-based projects
through programs like Networking the Nation (NTN), that provided few
tangible benefits because the programs didn’t have good performance
objectives. As the Auditor General pointed out in a 2003 report
(www.anao.gov.au), some of the “shortcomings” of the NTN program, and a
related program to form Rural Transaction Centres (RTC),

 “can be traced to insufficient planning at the start of the programs.
Neither Department established the range of performance information and
targets needed for evaluation purposes, nor the associated data collection
processes that needed to be put in place.”

The audit report above looked specifically at the $494 million provided in
telecommunications grants for 797 projects in the period up to 2003, and
administered by a full-time staff of 68 for the two programs. The
countryside was literally peppered with little grants whose chief purpose
seemed giving the local MP the opportunity for a press release.

And she describes the current NBN as “the headless chook approach to
telecommunications policy”?

To be completely fair, most of the grants above were before Senator Coonan’s
time, though she can take credit for a further $1.1 billion announced in
August 2005 under the “Connect Australia” banner
(www.minister.dcita.gov.au), not to mention the $1 billion awarded to the
Elders/Optus consortium for the failed OPEL project.

In nine months Singtel and Elders where unable to put one service in place,
and now it appears the Senator is saying the point of Broadband Connects was
to set up a “new independent wholesale network” to maintain “competitive
tensions”.

By “independent” I assume she means non-Telstra, which begs the question how
much chance Telstra ever had? She says that NBN is “putting taxpayer money
where it is not needed” ignoring the fact OPEL was essentially about
duplicating ADSL services in outer metro areas – where SingTel could make
more money, and MPs cadge more votes.

Senator Coonan says she may have separated Telstra if she had been in the
portfolio earlier, and that she can’t understand the current “obsession”
with fibre, saying it’s not the “be-all and end-all”. This comes from the
Minister who gave the world the Broadband “Beige-print”, as it quickly
became known.

It’s policy foresight like this that makes me glad she didn’t have the
opportunity to separate Telstra, because if she had there wouldn’t be a
fibre-based NBN – just as there isn’t in the UK where separation has gone
too far.