Dan Warne09 April 2009, 3:52 PM
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull today slammed the Rudd Government's $43 billion national road network.
The plan was announced by Kevin Rudd on Tuesday, after bids by state RTAs and toll road operators failed to adequately address congestion and road gridlock nationwide.
"No one else in the world has adopted this approach of a majority Government owned common carrier providing roads where the taxpayers carry the financial and construction risk," he said, seemingly glossing over the vast majority of roads which are, in fact, government owned.
"The key questions are: how much will it cost for families to drive around? When will the roads be ready? Will there be enough demand? How will email, post and phone calls affect the viability of the roads?
Turnbull cited statistics showing phone call volumes in Australia were increasing at a rapid rate, reducing demand for a national road network. "Over the last six months, 108 million bus, train and ferry tickets were purchased, but a massive 650 million phone calls were made," Turnbull said.
"The Government has not provided any evidence of the economic viability of this project. No evidence has been provided that there will be sufficient demand for this service at prices that will deliver a commercial return.
"This is a case of “build it and (hope) they will come," Turnbull concluded.
Does that sound nutty to you? It's a version of a press release issued by Malcolm Turnbull debunking the Government's fibre broadband plan, substituting discussion of broadband for discussion of roads. It might be a bad example given we should probably be looking to reduce road use for environmental reasons -- but ignore that for a second, and just think about how congested many of Australia's major arterial roads are.
Turnbull seems to be hung up on ensuring Telstra-like profits for the national broadband network -- even though no sane politican would demand the same from the public for a national road network.
It's time to view broadband as a national infrastructure project; hang the expense.
Last year, we saw petrol prices rise to nearly $2 a litre, which had the knock-on effect of pushing commuters out of cars and into public transport, with buses and trams full to capacity, often bypassing commuters waiting at stops. Many people have started thinking about the benefits of working from home, or getting a job closer to home, rather than doing a daily commute into the CBD.
In the future, with petrol reserves running out, and, ironically, road and public transport networks stretched to breaking point, employers are going to have to look at decentralising their workforce and placing employees around Australia where it makes economic sense for the employer -- and the employees.
A fast, reliable, ubiquitous national broadband network is the basic building block to achieving a work force that can work remotely. Sure, employers can get a high speed network connection to just about anywhere -- but the vast cost of dedicated corporate network connections with enough capacity to enable things like office-to-office video chat for every coworker makes it unviable. Most companies can only afford to offer limited internet access and access to corporate applications via their corporate networks.
If there's a 100Mbit/s network port into every home and business (delivering a true 100Mbit/s, not the false promise of 24Mbit/s from ADSL2+), it doesn't take much imagination to see that remote working will be very viable. It's more than enough bandwidth to handle video chat, and the soaring popularity of Skype video chat shows that the public is ready to accept this an alternative to meetings in many circumstances.
Such a fast national network, with a superfast fibre backbone to interchange data between users will also allow a revolution in medical care -- rural hospitals, which currently pay thousands to fly specialists from capital cities or even overseas one day a week to see patients -- will be able to mitigate much of those outlandish costs through high definition video conferencing.
But according to Malcolm Turnbull, Australia should only have a mish-mash of broadband options, with unpredictable coverage and limited speeds -- because that’s all people can afford to pay for while still generating profits for telcos.
Effectively, Turnbull is saying that unless you're prepared to have your street paved, you should put up with potholes -- which is fine for him and his mates, since fhe could afford to have his road lined with Italian slate tiles. But the rest of us quite rightly expect our tax dollars to go towards well maintained, sealed public roads, with a traffic system that allows traffic to flow smoothly as often as possible. Just as we should be able to expect the Government to build national broadband infrastructure.
P.S. For those who can't be bothered reading the whole article -- Malcolm Turnbull didn't actually say anything about roads. He did, however, say much the same things about the Government's broadband plan. In other words, it's satire/opinion.