Next stop: Conrovia!
It was Malcolm Turnbull who proudly put Conrovia on the political map. However, it wasn’t a town or a place.
It was the Coalition’s attempt at humour, a label to apply to the former Labor government’s plan — spearheaded by then Communications Minister Stephen Conroy (get it: Conrovia) — to deliver fibre to the premises (FTTP), reaching 93 percent of homes.
“Conrovia” was used to scoff at the NBN FTTP ambition; a fantasy so crazy, so expensive, and so impossible to deliver… a thing to be mercilessly ridiculed by the Coalition in parliament and by their backers in the media.
Spoiler alert — it wasn’t funny. And judging by last week’s Coalition backflip to deliver fibre to the premises, it looks like it wasn’t so crazy either.
Over ten years since Labor had announced a National Broadband Network — for which it’s been so heavily criticised — the Coalition quietly copied its classmate’s assignment announcing that perhaps, actually, this is what our country needs.
A surrender to the “fantasy” that in fact was a reality demanded by average Australians sick of the lack of broadband the Howard government was unable to sort out. Remember the Howard government made nearly 20 failed attempts to deliver better broadband, not helped by a then stubborn Telstra refusing to play ball.
This ended when Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy decided a government backed FTTP rollout would give the public what it wanted.
The stratospheric public approval of the idea of a National Broadband Network was something the Coalition couldn’t confront head on.
So they white-anted it claiming they could deliver a broadband network more efficiently and at less cost: purchasing 50,000km of copper to do the job. You can’t make this stuff up.
To fully understand the magnitude of last week’s backflip, remember the techniques conservatives deployed to erode support for the NBN.
A group of stale pollies (who believed Malcolm virtually invented the internet) argued broadband was only of value for watching YouTube clips, ignoring the transformative benefits high speed internet creates in education, health and employment.
Sure it was difficult to predict COVID, but many realised many years earlier that good broadband — better than what we had before 2007 — would deliver the ability to work from home, allow online learning, enable telehealth.
Haven’t those things been important in the last few months? Now imagine if we’d had to get through this pandemic with the feeble $6 billion version of an NBN the Coalition promised at the 2010 election.
Conservatives claimed with confidence, as PM Tony Abbott did, that households would be content with 25Mbps download speeds — worse, in 2010 asking why deliver 100Mbps when 12Mbps would do just fine.
Barely any Coalition claims stacked up. Labor in government said the NBN would cost $43 billion, the Coalition stated they could do it for $29 billion. Its multi-technology mix ended up costing $51 billion.
In Opposition, the Coalition promised to deliver 25Mbps to everyone by 2016. They ditched that a few months after being elected.
It criticised slow progress on Labor’s NBN, despite it being well-known that it takes ages to build up momentum for network rollouts and then they ran two years over time on their own rollout.
They said cable broadband, not optic fibre, was just as good. For those who might say the NBN has held up during the pandemic, I would say that the patchwork NBN delivered by the Coalition delivers patchy performance. As a constituent once told me, NBN HFC broadband is great to use at 4am when their neighbours are in bed.
And now, after telling us cheaper alternatives would work a treat, they’ll fork out an additional $4.5 billion to fibre up some of the places that don’t have it and make households pay for better speeds.
The country deserves an apology for all those lost years and wasted money. The NBN, like so many areas of public policy and reform, a victim of that ratty clump of the Coalition party room: the hard right.
Tony Abbott and his wrecking ball slammed into so many other areas of policy, while so called Liberal moderates watched or joined in to bray.
Besides the NBN, you could see it on energy policy, marriage equality, fiscal policy. Now they’re turning their gaze to superannuation after denying billions in support for the NDIS.
Throughout 2020 we have seen the embrace of many things the Coalition spent years resisting or deriding: FTTP, the admission that emissions trading wasn’t a “carbon tax”, the tip toe away from coal-fired power — and whatever happened to the Coalition mantra that abhorred debt and deficit?
Just for a moment, imagine how the extra $12.5bn paid for the compromised Coalition version of the NBN could have been invested?
$12.5bn towards boosting flagging levels of national R&D, lifting digital skills of the nation, avoiding cuts to universities and TAFE, supporting the growth of new tech enterprises, backing a national AI strategy to rival competitor nations, spurring greater ambition for our space industry, setting up the nation’s manufacture of electric vehicles.
And through this, evolving the nation’s economy to not only generate jobs, but to deliver sustainable prosperity not reliant on the ups and downs of commodity prices. Prosperity sprouting from the smarts of our own people.
A part of me says we shouldn’t waste more time shaking fists at lost years, we should just embrace the fact that the vision for better broadband has finally been acknowledged as one worthy of investing in.
So instead of shaking a fist, I extend a friendly elbow to Malcolm (to be COVID safe) and say: relax, friend, we’re all Conrovian now.
This opinion piece appeared in the Australian Financial Review on Monday, 28 September 2020.
