John Linton
It's 4 am Sydney time and we have just arrived at our hotel - a 20 hour 'door to door' trip including a two and a half layover in Bangkok and the usual death defying trip from the airport to the hotel. The trip itself was uneventful except for the amazing traffic approaching Sydney airport which was a two lane tailback stretching over a kilometer - according to our driver this is now a common occurrence on every Sunday.
I started this blog entry thinking I was OK but I am struggling to keep my eyes open so I will have to finish it when I wake up....so a few hours later it's now the start of a new day and after tidying up my email I read this:
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/beerfiles/46433-how-to-rein-in-nbn-costs
which while it adds no facts to the 'NBN2' saga it served to jog my memory on a number of issues including the sheer silliness of a gullible electorate thinking that a bunch of scummy politicians could get remotely close to estimating the cost of such an expensive 'adventure' over such an enormously long time frame.Then there are the changes that Labor made to the legislation that wil cntinue to wreak havoc until they are changed:
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/NBN-construction-IR-Leighton-Theiss-productivity-pd20110411-FSW47?OpenDocument&src=kgb
To while away some time during the long trip here I read P J O'Rourke's new book - "Don't Vote - It Just Encourages The Bastards" which, while aimed squarely at the total corruption and therefore the idiocy of US 'politics' is a mirror image of Australian, or as O'Rourke would have it, any 'democracy's political circumstances.His visceral disgust for the Democrats in the US makes my occasional despairing remarks about the Australian Labor party pale into faint praise in comparison. He wrote several chapters on various things a government, any government simply cant do and building major national infrastructures in competition with private enterprise was one of them.
To put that in perspective his 'chapter' on government actions to prevent 'global warning' was barely one page and dealt with the issues in the first sentence which went something like - "There's not a goddam thing you can do about it". He then spent a few paragraphs stating the obvious that western countries would simply tax themselves out of existence while one third of the world's population (China and India) built as many more coal fired power stations and iron ore smelting plants as the west ever contemplated closing. All that would happen would be a wealth transfer between the USA and the EU to those countries.
The Krudd/Gillard carbon tax initiatives are as stupid as the 'NBN2' initiative - they were designed to impress a gullible electorate in Krudd's three years of giant stupidities (whatever happened to the annual "ideas summit" by the way? Grocery watch? Fuel Watch? Do you want me to go on and name the other 35 gross stupidities swallowed up by the electorate?)) and Ms Faustus is trying to sustain enough belief in these two monumental stupidities to try and do what Krudd failed to do - make it through a first term in 'government' before her crass stupidity and naked hunger for 'power' is exposed.
So, back to the 'NBN2' costings. The point is that 'NBN2' Costings is an oxymoron put in place because only a moron would believe that Krudd/Conroy could actually cost such a product in less than 48 hours during a few plane trips hither and yon. How absolutely daft does any person have to be to think that a couple of no nothing politicians could cost a ten year national infrastructure project over such a period (or any period by dozens of truly knowledgeable and competent people? Apparently the sort of people to whom the news that 13 major construction tenderers could get even close to the gubmant's conjured up guess at the cost.
It's light now in Colombo so time to shower and got to work on something that has a true basis for execution and detailed costings to support the decision making - and no requirement to lose billions of tax payer dollars to prop up any egos.
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