| October 13th, 2010 |
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Much of the commentary about the National Broadband Network misses the crucial point of the whole issue to an infuriating extent.
I keep seeing people talking about the "business case", "revenue position", and things like that.
These would be critical issues if this were a private sector initiative.
But it isn't. It's a government project, and the crucial question for a government project is: Is this expenditure going to be of sufficient benefit to the populace to be worth the money?
You probably couldn't have made a good business case for the establishment of the Post Office. It's definitely not profitable to supply telephone service, or for that matter any services, of any kind, to rural and regional areas of Australia. They're too remote and there are too few people there.
Any model which offers to run the police force at a profit is guaranteed to be a very bad idea, and just recently it was quite well demonstrated that the Fire Department shouldn't be a retail service. The Royal Flying Doctor Service would make an American-style health insurance company faint - on a per-patient basis, it's a very expensive way to deliver medical care. It couldn't run at anything but a loss.
The entire purpose of the government is to do those things which are in the interests of the people and which are not going to be well-served by the private sector, for the benefit of society at large.
A nationally-integrated broadband network will be in the interests of Australia as a whole, and it is, in fact, genuinely important to extend it to rural communities - not so much regardless of how remote they are, but rather, the more remote they are, the more important it is.
Unless you think country people should feel isolated, should be left behind as the world progresses, and should lack access to amenities that are freely available to city-dwellers.
In which case: you're a bad person. Racist too, arguably, since that attitude affects indigenous Australians disproportionately. But definitely a bad person.
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