Abbott’s NBN confusion: Kohler

The national broadband network appears to have vanished from Tony Abbott’s post-election “to do” list.

It’s unclear whether cancelling the NBN has been dropped from the Coalition’s policy, but it certainly didn’t rate a mention in yesterday’s campaign launch by the Opposition Leader. Nor did infrastructure, or communications in general for that matter.

It’s not as if it wasn’t a pretty full three-month action plan that was laid out by Abbott yesterday – a flurry of cancellations (except for the NBN), a debt reduction taskforce, an economic statement, Murray-Darling Basin plan, emissions reduction fund, a Green Army, a National Violent Gangs Squad and then off to Afghanistan to rally the troops.

Shadow communications minister Tony Smith is due to announce the Coalition’s communications and IT policy tomorrow, before debating Minister Stephen Conroy and Greens’ spokesman Scott Ludlam at the National Press Club. But it didn’t make it into the action plan.

Nationals’ leader Warren Truss did mention the NBN in his speech yesterday, but in a most peculiar way.

He promoted the importance of a “robust communications network (that) will create better health services, better education, better employment and more business opportunities in regional Australia,” but then added, bafflingly, that Labor had “misled all Australians with its failed national broadband network”.

The idea that the NBN has failed already is an interesting angle of attack. The Coalition’s line, if I understand it correctly, is that the plan is too robust and too expensive, but not enough has been done to stop it being killed off.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb told ABC radio last week: “We’re not against the NBN. In fact we will shortly announce our alternative, but we are against returning telecommunications to be under government ownership, having a monopoly, a government monopoly running our telecommunications, the most dynamic sector.”

He said the Coalition would halt the NBN build and either sell it or incorporate it into its “broadband vision”. Sell it? Sell what? To whom?

In another radio blurt, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey seemed to hint that the Coalition is thinking about wireless: “I mean, you know, here I am, I’m driving up the F3 — I’m not driving the car, but I’m in the passenger seat — up the F3. I’ve got an iPad. I want to be able to get the internet. Now, when you have cable going to people’s homes for $43 billion-plus, it is not going to deliver that same sort of reception. You want mobility with the internet, and that’s what we’re looking at and we’ll have something to say before the election.”

The awkward problem for the Coalition is that the key to any coherent national communications policy in this country is Telstra.

The company has negotiated, over many months, a lavish and complicated deal with the Government and the NBN Company that is central both to the NBN and to Telstra’s future. The company seems to have embraced the idea of using the NBN as its customer access network and no longer being a fully integrated telco.

Telstra gets a huge cash payoff for its co-operation and has already begun slimming down. The share price has been strong lately and investors seem to like the deal.

Any alternative policy would have to have Telstra at its core, but the company can’t openly negotiate with the Opposition during the campaign. It certainly wouldn’t take over the NBN – the returns are nowhere near enough – but it would probably be quite happy to build a cheaper, Government-subsidised fibre-wireless alternative, especially if it meant remaining integrated, rather than “structurally separated”.

In that context, it was interesting to note that Telstra last week announced plans to build a fibre-to-the-home network in southern Queensland, covering 18,000 homes.

It went through to the keeper: Telstra played it down and none of the politicians picked it up.

Perhaps it was a wink to the Coalition: yes we can build a viable FTTH in built-up metropolitan areas – you just have to compensate us for wireless in the bush.

So keep Telstra’s quiet little southern Queensland FTTH network in mind when you read about the Coalition’s plans tomorrow.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.