John Linton
........and Stupider Stephen should take a real look at the present before he takes this sort of leap back in to the past:
http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/media/media_releases/2008/051
If he thinks that yet another $A270 million thrown after the last over $A650 million is a better bet than his recent cancellation of the OPEL contract he has achieved a double standard of breathtaking duplicity even for his incredibly low standards of intellectual consideration.
Under this latest "initiative" SS is providing funding of $6,000 per rural customer for an ISP to provide them with a satellite connection. Of course this is simply another version of the previous 'snouts in the trough' schemes that have helped fatten the wallets of companies like Soul (now deceased), WestNet (now deceased), iiNet and InterNode and a plethora of small regional companies who have been happy to take this handout and deliver stuff all to the end user before (in the small companies cases, going broke and in most of the larger companies cases being bought out) and leaving the $A6,000 handouts as yet another total waste of taxpayer money.
I can't remember all the names of the companies who have seen 'the City of Gold' these hand outs conjure up but they have taken these subsidies and gone broke all over the Australian continent. The latest small one was in Albury a couple of weeks ago - some outfit called "DragNet" who "specialised" in providing broadband via satellite using government subsidy in the local district. But there was the mob in Cairns (I don't remember their name but they spent a fair whack of their government handout sponsoring the local basketball team, the Taipans, and other ego trips - not on the infrastructure the subsidies were intended for) and then the group in Gippsland who had to be bailed out after going broke and so many others all of whom could never, in their wildest most alcohol fueled dreams have ever made a go of their crazily conceived schemes based on taking money from a gullible Federal agency.
So SS doesn't need the OPEL project because the NBN makes it unnecessary but 3 months later he needs the exact same expenditure to "cover areas not likely to be covered by the NBN" and he thinks giving this money to yet another group of carpet baggers is better than having Optus and Leightons, under strict tender and contract clauses, responsible for providing broadband to rural Australia.
I suppose, courtesy of 11 years of conservative government and the "resources boom", SS has access to the biggest pork barrel ever seen in Australia. He must be assuming that no-one will notice that he is now saying the opposite of what he said three months ago and is passing hundreds of millions of tax payers dollars in to the hands of groups of people who have only demonstrated that they can take huge government hand outs and deliver virtually nothing at best and absolutely nothing in most cases. So this latest tranche of handouts to the needy communications companies will keep them going for another 3 - 6 months before SS has to "announce" another major government funding initiative to deliver 'broadband' to rural Australia. I wonder if anyone of his staff has told SS exactly what these drip feed 'rural' expenditures are going to cost over the next three years?
I still don't understand why, given the very restricted nature of the services actually being delivered under these 'snouts in the trough' hand outs, SS hasn't woken up to the fact that HSPA already delivers the sort of service levels he is spending $A2,500 for up front and then another $A3,600 over the next three years. Of course HSPA doesn't need any subsidy as one of these rural users can get the promised 3 gb of downloads at better than 512/128 for $A40.00 a month from a CHOICE of HSPA providers. Why on Earth in 2008 is SS and CK promoting the use of satellite? Haven't their staff told them about HSPA?
It seems to me that someone in the ACT needs to read up on what's happening in the rest of the world where HSPA is being provided to remote communities that make White Cliffs look like the Sydney CBD. If they ever actually did the absolute minimum required in what I imagine part of their job remit looks like there would be no more money wasted paying greedy individuals to sub contract out installing satellite dishes and then going broke before more than a few months of service is delivered.
Then again, it seems that the quality of advice and the ministerial thought given to the latest pig feeding is on a par with the advice and depth of thought that went in to the 'no child in Australia will live without high speed broadband by December 2010".