The National Broadband Network (NBN) was meant to be a nation building project that positioned Australia as a leader in the global digital economy, but it has become a political football and as every day passes, Australia’s future prospects in the global digital economy are diminishing.

Having won the September 2013 Federal Election, the Abbott Coalition Government was quick off the blocks and by the end of the year NBN Co was a shadow of its former self having been given the task of rolling out a second rate network. To ensure that the Government’s plan would be followed to the letter the management team was replaced.

Having failed to gain a bipartisan approach to the NBN, the former Labor Government made a number of mistakes in the lead up to the project commencing in 2010 and foremost among the mistakes was failing to put in place reasonable measures to prevent a future Coalition Government from taking steps to “demolish the NBN” in the light of Abbott’s instructions to Turnbull in September 2010.

But who would have guessed that Malcolm Turnbull, future Prime Minister and former chairman of Internet Service Provider (ISP) OzEmail would have come up with such a regressive plan for the NBN as that presented as Coalition policy in July 2013.

In 2010 Mr Abbott stated that “the [Labor] Government is going to invest $43 billion worth of hard-earned money in what I believe is going to turn out to be a white elephant on a massive scale.”

Today we see that the Coalition’s efforts to “demolish the NBN” will cost $56 billion and rising and for this extraordinary amount of money, Australians will receive a second rate NBN with obsolete technologies being used for much of it.

Of concern to the telecommunications industry has been the approximately $3 billion financial windfall that Telstra has enjoyed since the Coalition government implemented its plan to “demolish the NBN”. One of the original goals of the NBN was to level the playing field, to create an open and fair competitive broadband market and the Coalition has done everything possible to undermine this outcome.

Leaks have been coming out of NBN Co from the very beginning, and it would be easy to attribute this to the lack of a bipartisan approach to building the NBN, but there is a need to account for the fact that the NBN was an ambitious effort to change Australia’s telecommunications market and there will always be some that think it is in the public interest to leak information that is being sat on for various reasons.

When the Coalition Government took office there were promises by Turnbull, who was the Minister for Communications at the time, of increased transparency and a business-like approach at NBN Co. In reality, NBN Co set about implementing a draconian approach to information security.

The key reason why the Government is concerned about the leaks is the apparent disparity between what official NBN Co reports present and what the leaks tell us. On many occasions, experts have questioned the figures in the official NBN Co reports drawing upon evidence from around the world and more recently from across the ditch where New Zealand is now laughing at Australia as it moves forward with its Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) rollout.

In an effort to “stop the leaks” NBN Co referred the problem to the Australian Federal Police in December 2015 after NBN Co failed to identify who was leaking the reports. NBN Co informed the Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield.

This is where this matter becomes Machiavellian, because Fifield appears to have claimed that he did not notify the other NBN Co shareholder Finance Minister Matthias Cormann nor his boss Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of the investigation. This is right out ofYes Minister.

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