The NBN battle could crush Malcolm Turnbull: Kohler

Tony Abbott has quite possibly given Malcolm Turnbull the worst job in the parliament.

His task is to constantly complain that something he likes and agrees with, and that most voters will like and agree with, is too expensive. He will no doubt attack this job with flair and gusto and get a fair share of media attention, at least to begin with, but the Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband is travelling on a train to nowhere.

Far better for Shadow Ministers to complain that the government is not doing enough than too much.

Turnbull said yesterday that the National Broadband Network would be “the absolute focus of the policy battle over the next 18 months”. Tony Abbott said he couldn’t think of anyone better to hold the government “ferociously to account”.

So every time the Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, stands with NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley alongside a local member and a local Mayor in some regional town somewhere over the next few years and declares open its high speed fibre broadband access, Malcolm’s job will be to shout “yah boo sucks” from the sidelines – to call a doorstop and declare that it was too expensive, and that town should not have got that fibre rollout.

Yesterday he was repeating the ridiculous line that the government has undertaken $43 billion of expenditure without a detailed business plan or cost benefit study, which has been the opposition’s line throughout the campaign. But what do they call the $25 million, 546-page, implementation study by McKinsey and Co and KPMG, released publicly on May 6?

And they must know that Quigley’s team has completed a detailed business plan that is slightly different from the government study and which will also soon be publicly released.

It will show that following the deal with Telstra, the cost will be much less than $43 billion, at which point Malcolm Turnbull will have to stop using that figure and start calling the NBN a $35 billion white elephant, or whatever figure it ends up being.

The question of whether the NBN is, in fact, a white elephant won’t be known for about a decade, by which time Malcolm will be approaching 66, and in the unlikely event that he is still Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband, he will have grown old complaining about the NBN.

It’s possible that the Productivity Commission or some independent think tank then does a study of the NBN and concludes that it was a waste of money and could have been done more cheaply, in which case the ageing shadow minister could call a press conference and croak: “See! I told you it was a white elephant!”

More likely, the worlds of communications and politics will have moved on somewhat by then. If a year is a long time in politics, it is an even longer time in telecommunications and the internet. Ten years is totally unplottable.

The more interesting question is what sort of a time will the man who was leader of the opposition for a year and ten weeks, and would like to be again, get over the next 12 months. After making the difficult decision to run again for the seat of Wentworth after losing the leadership of the Liberal Party by one vote, presumably because he thinks he can be leader again, will complaining about the NBN make that decision seem like a good one?

Is there any possibility, in short, that he won’t end up being regarded as a bit of a joke, and find that fewer and fewer journalists turn up to his press conferences?

A lot of smart, well informed people think he’s right about the NBN, but the problem is that they are now likely to move on with their lives, now that the election has been won and Telstra has been brought inside the tent.

The NBN will get built and Mike Quigley’s record suggests each stage will come in on time and on budget, which Stephen Conroy will no doubt make a big deal about.

And with each passing month, Malcolm Turnbull’s relevance will shrivel. Is this what Tony Abbott intended?

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.