It’s a backflip more than a decade in the making. Today, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher unveiled the Coalition’s big new plan to bring high-speed fibre-to-the-home internet to 2 million households around the country.
You could almost see Kevin Rudd’s face reddening. In 2009 the then-prime minister proposed a plan in which fibre-optic cables would run straight to people’s homes, delivering super-fast internet. For three years, the Coalition savaged that plan as a costly white elephant — yet another sign of Labor’s extravagant fiscal profligacy.
Then, after winning the 2013 election, they swiftly ditched Labor’s plan for a multi-technology mix, which saved money but delivered slower internet. Then the pandemic hit, everyone started working from home, and Australia’s internet infrastructure looked pretty inadequate.
Now that the Coalition is finally realising Rudd’s plan, it’s worth having a look at what the Liberals have said about fibre to the home over the years.
Get Crikey FREE to your inbox every weekday morning with the Crikey Worm.
Abbott’s white elephant
The Coalition’s attacks on the NBN were driven by Abbott — a notorious luddite — who, in 2010, ordered then-communications minister Malcolm Turnbull to “demolish” it.
Abbott, the two-fingered typer, couldn’t understand why Labor would spend taxpayers’ money on a “video entertainment system”. That quote comes from this 2010 press conference where he and Turnbull chuckled at the prospect of people watching things on the internet.
In 2012, he said the NBN was “the greatest white elephant this country has ever seen”. It was far more important, he said, to get the Pacific Highway duplicated.
Turnbull the attack dog
In a simpler time, a more loyal Turnbull relished his role as Abbott’s NBN attack dog. In 2010, he said Australians just didn’t want the internet speeds that 100Mbps fibre to the home would deliver. A decade on, Fletcher’s fibre-to-the-home pivot will be based on household demand.
Like Abbott, Turnbull’s attacks focused on the supposedly obscene cost of fibre to the home. In 2013 he said, “[it’s] like saying to a builder, just build me a big house, I don’t need a quote, I don’t need a contract”.
After the election, Turnbull was tasked with junking fibre to the home. Before getting the results of a key review into the NBN, he proceeded with a pivot to a multiple technology mix. None of this, of course, stopped Turnbull from ensuring his Point Piper mansion had internet speeds of 100Mbps.
Fletcher, Fifield continue attacks
Paul Fletcher, architect of the backflip and a former Optus executive, also had some choice words about fibre to the home. In 2012, he argued that Labor’s plan would “entrench a digital divide” and that a fibre-to-the-node system could still deliver a “fast and rich internet experience”.
In 2015, he praised Turnbull’s “fact-based approach” to the NBN, and said that a multi-technology mix was “the best way to deliver high speeds”.
His predecessor, Mitch Fifield, sang from the same hymnbook. Last year he argued that the Coalition had taken over a failing Labor project and actually delivered better internet speeds. And earlier this year, as Kevin Rudd started firing potshots at the Coalition over the NBN, Fletcher hit back.
“Labor’s plan for the NBN was fanciful — and Labor’s implementation of it was hopeless,” he wrote in an AFR op-ed. “The NBN has come through just when our nation needed it most,” he declared.
Within months, he’d changed his mind.
Leave a comment
… why isn’t Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull and others from the LNP in gaol?? They’ve colluded with a foreigner called Murdoch to rip off the Australian Taxpayer by installing a 5th rate bungled internet delivery system in order for this foreigner to get a financial advantage of restricting commercial competition from other video streaming companies. And they are still providing corrupt favours to this foreigner by giving him Tender free amounts of taxpayers money to finance his failing video streaming business… cronyism and carpet bagging at its worst…
You didn’t have to be a genius to realise that similar to the price on carbon, the coalition were just playing “brutal retail politics” (as Peta Credlin describes it), with the NBN. Anything less than FTTP was going to be woefully inadequate within a few short years. Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law would have told them that. Forget the “backflips”, and “eating their words” etc, the media should be castigating the coalition for stuffing up the NBN.
What i have the most issue with is that there existed technology at the time (FTTC) that could have delivered the whole “cheaper” NBN while not relying on unreliable node boxes or buying telstras copper network.
It wouldnt have been as good as FTTH but it wouldbt have been much worse.
“… the media should be castigating the coalition” – the entrenched media are the ones who’ve benefitted from market protection for video streaming, as Milton says (https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/09/23/nbn-backflip-liberals/#comment-461053).
The media should be patting the coalition on the back and passing over the cash. Oh, wait… they are.
They deserve castigation but credit for getting there in the end, except that they have the number wrong. Every household should have the best possible internet.
Credit for getting there in the end ? Really ? It’s taken longer than the Labor would have taken, cost more, and DID create the digital divide they rabbited on about. They deserve zero credit, and as a poster above said, they (Abbott, Turnbull, Fifield, Fletcher) should be in jail.
Wrong..it’s cost less…
3. Rudd & Conroy don’t understand public finance
Australians didn’t need, and weren’t prepared to pay for, the higher speeds an all-fibre network would have offered.
Until 2017, when NBN Co started discounting its 50 Mbps plans, most of the end-users were on 12 Mbps and 25 Mbps plans.
Even now, nearly a third of them are on those lower-speed plans and NBN Co expects that by 2024 there will still be only about 20 per cent of businesses and households on plans with 50 Mbps-plus speeds.
Today, even where there is fibre-to-the-premises, the take-up of plans with download speeds greater than 50 Mbps among those premises is in the mid-teens. There’d be a lot of very expensive and wasteful unused capacity if every premise in the network were connected to fibre.
I kind of know what you mean. At least they are doing it, finally. But after years and years of refusing and denying, I would appreciate an admission and an apology. It sticks in my craw when you say anything about giving “credit” in relation to this fiasco, because it was so very wrong. Like in the middle of building a new home, sacking the architect, sacking the builder, changing the whole building design to one that is way cheaper and not worrying about a driveway or any doors. Then, after years of living in this house, having to climb in windows, finally saying: “maybe we should build a door”. If you think someone should get credit for finally admitting the bleeding obvious, then yes. Give them credit.
My original comment is still awaiting approval, so I will amend the trigger words.
I hear what you are saying. But it’s more “about effing time” and “you will be held to account for the fact that you revel in your parents not having been married”, than credit, they deserve.
(And no, you don’t deserve all the down votes for trying to be conciliatory.
I like down votes, they are refreshing.
Too much like the skool yard, when the pusillanimous pile on.
We continually see how progress in this country has been hampered by the same political parties time after time. How any thinking person votes for them has me beat.
But I guess it is only taxpayer money and they are the better money managers. I would hate to see a conservative wasting our money on ideological causes.
I’ll tell you how: my mum used to vote for them and it was because her Church told her to. The Church told her that the Liberal party was more in keeping with the doctrine of he Bible because they were anti-abortion , anti-gay, etc.
I tried to argue with her, telling her that Jesus never mentioned these topics and reminding her that Jesus said to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and I told this to mean, that the Church should KEEP OUT of politics, but she wouldn’t go against the Church authority.
Did you tell her the Church should also pay their taxes.
Oh you bet I did.
Wow! Which lucky Liberal voting electorates with narrow margins are going to be the favoured ones?
NBN Rorts 2.0?
I could name a couple in Tasmania that had their original contracts for FTH cancelled by Abbott/Turnbull & we now have second rate FTN.