From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Kristin Amiot. It's Tuesday, January fourteenth. Plans for the Prime Minister's first face to face meeting with President elect Donald Trump have yet to firm up, but Anthony Alberizi says an upcoming COUD meeting between Australia, India, Japan and the United States could provide the perfect opportunity.
When I had discussion with the incoming president, we discussed the quad. We had a discussion there about those details, but they occur diplomatically and we will get that organized appropriately.
Items from Barry Humphreys private collection will be sold at auction in London next month. The comedian's late son, Oscar Humphries says his father lovingly built the collection, which includes the iconic gloves as he donned as Dame Edna Everidge over seven decades. You can read that story right now at the Australian dot com dot au. Anthony Albanezi contends he can sol Australia's economic woes through a cash splash,
and he's starting with the National Broadband Network. The Prime Minister announced the government will spend three billion dollars on the NBN to finish the project started by his labor predecessors. But will it win an election? That's today's episode. If you're an Australian of a certain age, this sound is
probably equal parts nostalgic and annoying. It was a simpler time on the Internet, when your mum had to hound you off the computer in order to make a phone call from the family landline, when websites were pixelated and finite in a way that feels quaint compared with today's World Wide Web, and when you could quite literally ask the government to remove offensive content.
Since the legislation came into effect on January one this year, the government body charged with applying the legislation through an online complaint hotline, has received only ninety complaints, leading to twenty seven takedown notices.
I think I was in grade six and we got internet and it was very exciting.
Greg Brown is the Australian's Canberra Bureau chief.
I think I tried to look up some cricket scores or something like that, and the dial up took a long time to get any information, let alone watching videos or anything that was impossible. So I think when you look back on what the Internet was like all those years ago in the nineteen nineties, it's hard to imagine that it's so fast these days and it's just pull out your phone and you can google anything.
Fast forward to two thousand and seven, when the whole world was online. Fledgling social networks, global travel and international business dealings demanded faster and more powerful Internet connections. It was then, following a federal election victory, that the rud government pledged to get Australia literally up to speed.
Ask anyone in the IT industry what faster broadband would mean for Australia and they'll tell you it would change everything.
It's going to change the way we've worked, live, play.
And learn, And thus the National Broadband Network was born. Labour's plan was to have ninety three percent of Australian households connected to the Internet via a national Fiber to the Premises network or FTTP by the middle of twenty twenty one. Basically, that means most households would be tethered to the Internet via fiber optic cables, which can carry a lot more data a lot faster over long distances
than traditional copper wires. The first customers were connected in Tasmania in twenty ten, in a rollout The Australian later described as shambolic and abysmal.
A devastating strategic review found cost blowouts and delays had plagued the nation's biggest infrastructure project, with significant cues in connections and disputes over construction related contracts for a.
Whole lot of reasons we'll get into later. That twenty twenty one deadline came and went with about ninety percent of Australian premises connected to the NBN, and now the Labor government has pledged to get it over the finish line.
Labour created the Nation Broadband Network and only Labor will finish the NBN and importantly keep the NBN in public hands. Today we're announcing an equity injection of three billion dollars into the NBN. The NBN CO will contribute more than eight hundred million dollars to this project.
So they're going to bring nearly all the remaining premises, homes and businesses that don't have the fiber all the way to their door. So it's basically going to be fiber for I think ninety five percent of the network which was the original dream of Kevin Rudd. Obviously this change under the former coalition government. Initially it was cheaper to have fiber to the node and then copper going
out to each individual home and business. But now they're saying that the government will put more money into it so that every household as the fastest possible ambient experience.
On Monday, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland claimed this multi billion dollar equity injection into Australia's biggest ever infrastructure project would keep internet plans affordable, but she didn't really say how Now.
It is the case that many Australians are choosing to use five G networks and that is their choice. But the absolute truth is this that fiber is regarded across the world and certainly by NBNCo, as the standard when it comes to ensuring the highest quality broadband services. And that is because nothing is faster than the speed of light.
With a federal election just around the corner, both the major parties are making their pitch to Australians struggling under a cost of living crisis, so could cheaper internet plans get labor over the line.
This goes very much into the philosophical economic debate that we're seeing in the very early stages of this it's not even election campaign yet, but Alberanzi and Dunton have both been out campaigning. So Anthony alberanzi key slogan is building Australia's future and it's very much about government spending. He was in Queensland and Western Australia and the Northern Territory last week. There was a seven billion dollar announcement to upgrade the Bruce Highway. There was packages in all
the little towns. He went about government money for housing and smaller infrastructure projects, and the point really being is that government under his vision has a big role to play, whereas in Peter Dutton he was saying in his first speech over the weekend that it would be private enterprise that needs to lead the economic recovery in the future. So Peter Dunnen on the one hand, is saying we want government to get out of the way and have
the right settings for private enterprise. But Alberanezi is saying there is an active role for government to play and I think we're seeing that with this NBN announcement that the government is committing three billion dollars more to a public entity and a big part of this as well as they are warning that the Coalition has a secret
plan to privatize the NBN. Now there's no evidence for that, but Labor is saying that they will be the only ones that will keep it in public hands and therefore they will keep prices down.
Coming up inside the fight for the Internet in Australia. When the Right government first announced it would embark upon the biggest end arguably one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Australia's history, it wasn't necessarily in it for
the long run. Following an initial investment of about forty billion dollars from the government and private stakeholders, the Treasury estimated the NBN would start paying for itself by that twenty twenty one deadline, with Labour's thirty billion dollar investment paid off by the mid twenty thirties. Then it said it would sell off the NBN within five years of its completion. But this is where the current Labor government's plan diverges now.
Last year in the House of Representatives, we had a vote in the Parliament to keep the NBN in public cans and Peter Darton and the Coalition opposed that vote. When the Senate sits again next time, they will have a choice of whether they do support the NBN staying in public hands or whether they will again vote to allow for the NBN to be flogged off to private interests.
The Productivity Commission estimates the NBN is worth about twenty billion dollars, significantly less than the thirty five billion that's been splashed on its rollout since two thousand and eight. So how will labor foot the bill if it gets up at the next election. Here's Greg Brown.
This is another increase in spending that what they say is goes off budget, so it's not reflected in the forward estimates, but it still leads to overall national debt. The answer, the broader answer to you question, though, is that neither side is showing signs that they will be putting up revenue measures to be able to pay off
debt at a faster rate. And so Anthony Alberzi has been out in making more than he's made more than ten billion dollars of space announcements this year alone, and when I actually asked him on the road last week what revenue measures he would have to offset this, he didn't have an answer, and I think the answer is that bracket creep is really the key to bringing the budget back into balance, and that's not forecast to happen
for another decade. So the old era of both sides of politics being fiscally prudent, which was the case for so really most of the twentieth century, or certainly the latter half of the twentieth century, that that's really eroding at the moment.
The political arjibarji over ownership is just another stop on the NBN's long road to fruition. In twenty ten, then Opposition leader Tony Abbott vowed to demolish the NBN if and when the Coalition won government. He wouldn't get his chance until twenty thirteen. And while the Coalition didn't exactly go around ripping up cables, it did make some significant
changes to the NBN. Most notably, former Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull chucked out the existing NBN board and implemented a new technology mix that would take the focus off FTTP costs blew out, as did the delivery timeline. When he became PM, Turnbull blamed the Rudd and Gillard governments for the delays and now Anthony Alberizi says the job would have been done if the Coalition just stuck with the plan.
They didn't understand that the NBN is about productivity. It's absolutely critical to the way that a modern economy and a modern society functions.
I just think a lot of Australians have not had a positive experience from using the NBN, and a lot of people think it's been one big waste of money. It is interesting that the government is is really putting so much political capital in this because clearly they think they're onto a winner. But I think people have mixed
views about it. Increasingly people are using five G and while Labor might say the reason you've had a bad experience with the NBN is because the Coalition didn't do it properly, I just think people in a broader sense think NBN and it's no good. They're not thinking about whether the Coalition or Labor delivered it poorly. You know, they just didn't have a good experience of it. So I'm sure the research is telling them that people don't want the NBN to be privatized, and that's why they're
ramping up this fear campaign. On us. I'm not convinced it will be a vote winner for them.
Greg Brown is the Australian's camera bureau chief. You can read that story, as well as all the nation's best news, sport, politics and business right now at the Australian dot com dot au