Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian Government bonds in a dress.
But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their rights to waive the requirement for confidence.
Consequently, nobody really knows how the rollout is going or what it costs. NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they are able to claim in aggregate to be on track.
Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to
build, there's still the important question of building it the right way. And IMO that's not been happening, and it really bugs me.
edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.
Edit 2: A mate of mine pointed out that they made the same announcement before the 2010 election:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-downloa...
Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian Government bonds in a dress.
But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their rights to waive the requirement for confidence.
Consequently, nobody really knows how the rollout is going or what it costs. NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they are able to claim in aggregate to be on track.
Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to build, there's still the important question of building it the right way. And IMO that's not been happening, and it really bugs me.
edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.