Whether this is a reflection of the government’s inability to sell it properly or not, people clearly are STILL not getting the point of the proposed expenditure on Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).
| Broadband Won’t Come Cheap |
The money being spent is not being spent for it to be recouped. Okay? Do we build a $500M freeway and expect the money to come back over it’s life? No!
The NBN is an “infrastructure investment”. It’s a new freeway. You put a freeway in to make the rest of the ecomony around that freeway to become more efficient. Shorter travel times for people and freight, and the like. But the $500M for the freeway doesn’t come back to the place that money originally came from. You build it to allow MORE than $500M of advantage to come to the rest of the economy, simply because it exists.
The NBN is the same. The money is being spent so that everything else in the economy can improve, and ultimately generate – (via new business) – or save – (via increased efficiency of existing business) – money that might have been wasted in a piecemeal effort. Worse still, we could not spend the money at all, and let the Australian economy fall behind the rest of the world because we are communicating with tin-cans and string.
I just wish people would start seeing the point!