John Linton ...for the failure of his first bluff to deliver on his sound bite election vote winner of an "NBN" ($A4.7 billion to 98% of the Australian population within 5 years becomes $A43 billion to 90% of the population in 8 years - after f***ing around for 18 months pretending they were almost ready to begin). Just remember I was the the person who "unkindly" said that the acronym "NBN" was Krudd-speak for "No Broadband Now". Krudd clearly is a devotee of the 19th century US political process of "when your first lie fails simply tell a bigger lie".
Why do I say this?
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/funding_programs__and__support/national_broadband_network/national_broadband_network_policy_brochure
What would your estimate be of when Krudd and co commissioned this bit of fluff to be written (bearing in mind it was 'published co-incidentally with El Presidente's announcement that his BS about an 'NBN' tender had been found out to be a farce and had to be scrapped via his humiliating back down yesterday?). But not to worry the Australian electorate are so f***ing stupid they will fall for the new enormous bluff and there's only 18 months to the next election to maintain the bluff.
While I have no real idea of how long it takes a technically illiterate bunch of public servants to select the appropriate 'consultants' to write the techo jargon and then hire another bunch of consultants to pretty up the presentation and then get the appropriate sign offs I'm guessing it was not in 2009. Which raises the question of how much of the NBN tenderer's time has been wasted going through the charade of making a bid under the original tender 'guidelines'?
Like everything Krudd promises and then attempts to do, it's all smoke and mirrors using random quotes for support and glossing over any factual content. It follows precisely the methodology of every one of his other lies - no detail on time frame/no detail on costing - just wide blue sky generalisation. Anyone remember his first three 'promises'?:
1) The Ideas Summit (never heard from again)
2) The Kyoto Protocol (signed with immense self promotion and then abandoned without a second thought)
3) Saying "sorry" to some indeterminate group of people on behalf of another indeterminate group of people (street theatre with Krudd as the only participant and then 'back to business as usual)
Froth and bubble in between self aggrandising overseas trips.
Now, nine months after the NBN was meant to be already underway we have the squirming worm trying to make an abject back down look like some sort of personal triumph - totally sickening.
...and I actually agree that the structural separation of Telstra is one of the only solutions for Australian communications and that if money is going to be p***ed away by this jerk then it would be better spent on building infrastructure that employs Australians rather than being stuck in to poker machines and wasted by buying cheap imported liquor in bottle shops or making bikie gangs wealthier.
But 'winging' completely un-costed (in any senses of those words) numbers like $A43 billion and "27,000 new jobs" is just charlatanism at its most barefaced. Krudd's increasing belief that he can get away with saying anything:
"The "hand out of over $A10 billion to low income Australians will create 75,000 new jobs"
springs to mind - is a terrible indictment of the Australian electorate's stupidity coupled with a mind blowing level of credulity. How does spending $A10 billion to create 75,000 jobs compare with spending $A43 billion to create 27,000 jobs? Krudd's ability to believe that he can say whatever he likes seems to have allowed him to 'depreciate' what the tax payer dollar now buys in terms of "new jobs" by an order of magnitude in one short sentence.
No-one, and I mean no-one, could believe that either of Krudd's head line numbers in his back down speech yesterday could even reflect a scintilla of actual hard number crunching - even if they were taken from the bids of those dummies that have p***ed away their time and money helping "the expert panel" understand the magnitude of the task.
So what to make of it all?
Nothing has changed - Krudd's Labor party is clinging grimly to their tactics to obtain a second term in "power" by spending two generations of Australian's future income and lying outrageously about the time frames so that they can get close to the 'wire' before it becomes obvious to the Labor electorate that they have been conned.
This will, partly, be at the cost of a total freeze on any innovation or investment in any sort of communications infrastructure by anyone in Australia except Telstra. (strange about that).
No 'spade' will hit the ground in mainland Australia before pretty close to the next election, if it does at all, and the lawyers will get even richer with the various challenges that Telstra will make (though there is a more than reasonable conspiracy theory that says that Telstra 'did a deal' to get the NBN canned and in exchange for an agreed cash payment and ownership guarantees in the new "authority" it would submit a non-conforming bid to get the whole process abandoned meanwhile announcing the way forward by a mix of terrestrial and wireless technologies).
In the mean time Tasmania will get some funding so that it can appear a start has been made and to sow up the 5 federal Tasmanian electorates at the next election which is sort of fine because Tasmania has been shafted by Telstra for 18 years and if Krudd can throw away billions on one small selection of Australians he may as well shovel some money to another selected group. (though, note the overt political cynicism in shoveling money at Tasmania where there are five federal electorates all of which have a propensity to 'swing' in federal elections whereas, a presumably similar bid for the ACT, which has an equal number of people and always votes Labor in a federal election didn't get the go ahead). Pig in a cask time starts before the beginning?
In summary:
Krudd's 'NBN' bluff was called and he had to back down in the most humiliating way possible.....make NO mistake...he had to admit that everything he promised was a hopeless lie and that everything that had been said by him and his cat's paw, Stupid Stephen, was pure BS from the first utterance - there is no other way of looking at it.
Krudd lacked any form of 'gracefulness or self accountability' in his back down acknowledgment and simply substituted a much bigger bluff with time frames that mean he can get to the next election without having an even greater humiliation - on this topic at least.
...but then I may be completely wrong in my interpretation of the FACTs that have attended the last 18 months (including yesterday's) of this travesty of a government.
PS: Although my lightening fast mind sees these things more quickly than financial journalists - eventually they reach the same conclusions:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25317958-14743,00.html
Just what this country needs - another government telecommunications monopoly.
Where did I put my retirement home application form?
PS: Krudd makes Whitlam look like a fiscal conservative.....and look where that moron ended us up.