On
Since that announcement was made, I have had close to 3,000 cups of tea, and have tried many, many times to say “a new, open access, high-speed, fibre-based broadband network” ten times rapidly in succession. Now it has been suggested on numerous occasions, that I have such a marvellous gift of convoluted speech and obfuscation, that I should seek a career in the noble realm of politics. (Well, one cranky school teacher actually advised that on two different occasions.) However, I have not been able to get my tongue around that. Worse still, though, I have not been able to get my brain around it.
There is an old saying that a week is a long time in politics. If that is so, then nine months is an enormous amount of time. In fact, it is long enough to incubate even a potential politician. Despite that passage of a seeming eternity, the good minister has not attempted to use any of the marvellous electronic media gadgetry to convey to us members of the public, just what it is that he had in mind when he made his call for proposals.
Generally speaking, if a person calls for proposals, that person has, at the very least, some sort of model floating around in that grey matter that populates the cranium, which represents just what it is that is required, how it will work, and who will work it. Since, in all of that time, our good minister has not made it in any way clear just what it is that he is after, and what it will be all about, we must get just one tiny bit suspicious that he, himself, doesn’t actually know. If that is the case, then how are the proposal drafters supposed to know? Perhaps, the potential proposal producers are highly psychically gifted. Even an inveterate skeptic would be alarmed if the whole matter involved the blind leading the blind.
The whole ambition is a mystery. One can take a guess at what is meant to be conveyed by any of the beautiful adjectives in the call-to-arms, but guesses they will remain until such time as the good minister gets a sudden burst of insight and a burning desire to clearly verbalise such insight. Just what does he mean when he says “open access?” Does he mean that when this thing, this marvellous piece of infrastructure, is actually built, it will be open to every wild Internet service provider with a six-gun in his hand, to jump on and run his service on the new thing, and charge us little members of the public fees, and thus make profit, at our expense, on the use of our own infrastructure? Would it be a certifiable psychiatric condition to think that perhaps the good minister means that every Aussie mum, dad, school kid, business woman, adults of all shades and sizes, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all will be able to use the thing for a nominal fee, or, dare I say it, for free?
Meanwhile, we ignorant members of the great unwashed public continue to enter into one and two-year contracts with Internet service providers for access to services that are certainly not as well adjectivally endowed as the scheme that the minister announced.
How many cups of tea will we have before the minister or the tea leaves gives us some hint of the future?
Crankyfella
1 comment:
Did the Minister make this a "core promise" or not. Best ask the former Treasurer, Peter Costello, because he is the one who made the difference between a "core" and a "non core promise".
Have a nice day.
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