Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter.M
If you want to see what a dumb idea it is its called the southern expressway google says the duplication is costing us 400 million.
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We have only done marginally better in Vic. It was apparently well identified at the time it was to start construction that the Western Ring rd around Melbourne really needed to be at least three lanes form end to end as it would be maxed out almost as soon as it was completed, that was about ten years ago and after five years of ever worsening congestion we have had over five years of constant roadworks almost from end to end to increase it from it's original two lanes and to delete some insanely poor road design. It has largely been completed in the section I drive daily but before that it used to take longer for the last 15KM of my drive than the first 60 did.
I suppose given the arguments put in this thread that still disregard the funding model and posit that the money for the NBN can just be swung over to other uses, which are not borrowed money on what amounts to a lowish return commercial investment any more and would almost certainly instead show up as a cost on the budget. and the fact hat we cant even get a 20KM road right in suburban Melbourne and short sightedly build it smaller than we need it to be to save money initially (Defer it slightly in fact) It is no surprise that the libs plan gets as much support as it does. We would rather save 30% now to get something second rate that will be obsolete pretty much when it reaches practical completion and require replacement, with little of it's infrastructure being useful in its eventual upgrade than to get very basic infrastructure right the first time around. That is without even going into the likely effect of breaking the pricing model too as they are likely to decide to allow infrastructure competition too and that will perpetuate the last 20 years of "Competition" where the competitors cherry pick the profitable areas and the rest can go hang. And Telstra does lovely stuff like not enabling ADSL2+ in an area until someone else does and restricts access to exchanges etc etc etc. Sets retail prices lower than wholesale, etc etc. you get the picture.
People keep on carping on about huge delays, go look up the corporate plans, we are still so early in the ramp up phase that the actual distance behind the 8 ball it is (Which anyone with any knowledge of it will admit that it is) is actually difficult to make out on the graph. You have to change the scale of the graph to make it meaningless in the overall context of the build for the plan versus actual difference to stand out, and most of that falls inside the line made if you move everything to the right by 6 to 9 months to account for the single biggest delay in the project, the Telstra agreement (Which is one of the most complex commercial arrangement in Australian history and which will now need to be substantially renegotiated)
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at this point, what we are going to get is the libs Notional Broadband Network, hopefully, and just like climate change we are going to find out who is right by experiencing it first hand. At least unlike climate change, if the libs are proven as wrong as I expect them to be we don't loose as much in a tangible sense, you can always decide it was all a huge cock up and restart a FTTH build in a couple of years time.
On the climate change front, I am not particularly tarring the libs there, both sides were hell bent on plans that would make pretty much no difference. Just one of them they could call a tax for the purpose if a nice election slogan and the other one they have not told us yet what tax the money to do it with is going to come from, new or old.