By Peter Hartcher
BARNSTORMING Barnaby Joyce is doing what he does best - painting pictures with words. And he specialises in troubling pictures.
"This is other people's money," he told the Senate on Thursday. "There will be some lady at a checkout who will work late into the night to pay tax to pay this debt back."
No other politician since Paul Keating can paint a rhetorical picture with the quick, colourful brushstrokes of Joyce. He is a madcap populist to Keating's deadly seriousness, but just as effective.
More than any other politician, it was Joyce who destroyed the Kevin Rudd-Malcolm Turnbull plan for an emissions trading scheme.
His target this time? Julia Gillard's national broadband network.
His purpose is to create doubt, to generate fear. He is often funny, sometimes ridiculous, and always entertaining.
He may not be able to tell a million from a billion, and he was named after a cartoon character - his parents were both fans of Barnaby the Mathematical Genius - but the leader of the Nationals in the Senate is very effective.
The opposition no longer promises to demolish the network. The idea is too popular. A Essential Media poll in September found 56 per cent of people in favour of the plan for near-universal superfast internet, and only 18 per cent against.
Instead, the opposition now claims it is only pursuing the government to make sure that it builds the network as cheaply and efficiently as possible. And while Turnbull argues the articulate and intelligent case for accountability by the government, Joyce paints pictures:
"As an accountant I spent a lot of time with people who did not respect money, and I saw those people at the end of the day getting to live in their son's or daughter's caravan because they lost their house."
But in reality, the pursuit of accountability is about to become a decision on whether Australia will have a national broadband network at all. The decisive moment comes next week with a vote in the Senate.
At stake is the future of the Gillard government and, more importantly, Australia's national competitiveness.
The Mexican telephone billionaire Carlos Slim Helu got a ton of publicity a few months ago for saying that the Australian broadband plan was too expensive.
He won instant media cred because Forbes magazine ranked him the world's richest man this year, worth $US53.5 billion. Fair enough.
Go a little deeper. He bought the Mexican phone monopoly when it was for sale at a bargain price. He is a monopolist.
Naturally, he doesn't like the national network idea - if Mexico did what Australia proposes, it would oblige him to allow the government to use part of his network for the public good and for competing companies.
Should we really take this man seriously on the subject of telecommunications competition? He didn't amass 5 per cent of Mexico's national GDP in his personal bank account because of his public-spiritedness.
He has never used a computer, according to London's Daily Telegraph. Should we really allow this man's casual opinions to guide our national technological future?
Instead, consider the opinion of someone with real technological expertise. Larry Smarr is the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information (or Calit2). When the rest of us were buying our first VCRs, Smarr was already building a network that we would later discover as the internet.
What does one of the inventors of the internet have to say about the Australian national broadband network?
He likens it to another great piece of government infrastructure: "The government provides a uniform, ubiquitous, future-proofed infrastructure on which the private sector competes on services. This is very similar to the investment in the interstate highway system that the US made 50 years ago, which helped transform the US into an economic powerhouse."
The Australian plan for optic fibre all the way to your home is the best possible technology, he says, because of the physics of the fibre cable - it is almost infinitely upgradeable because it transmits at the speed of light. Wireless capacity and speeds are limited but the fibre-optic cable in the broadband network is limited only by the speed of the technology at either end of it. As the computing power at either end improves, the fibre cable remains able to take virtually unlimited flows of data.
Another highly regarded US technologist, Mark Anderson, founder of the Future in Review, says that thanks to the broadband proposal, "We in the US refer to Australia constantly as one of the countries that 'gets it' when it comes to enabling a 21st-century society."
He adds: "People always have difficulty understanding capacity questions until that capacity is in their hands, and this will be true for all users of broadband in Australia. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that all who participate in the [network] will be seen as national heroes in the not-too-distant future; not decades from now, but in just a few years."
But other countries are ahead of both Australia and the US. Japan, South Korea and Singapore are well advanced in connecting national superfast fibre-optic broadband systems.
OK but what about Joyce's point? What use is fantastic broadband if it's so cripplingly expensive that we end up a nation of caravan-dwellers to pay for it?
First, the government's plan to build the network allows for a total investment of up to $43 billion. Of this, a maximum $26 billion would be public money, with the rest from the private sector.
That public share is a bit more than the $21 billion annual defence budget, and less than half the $56 billion annual health budget, but spread over five years. And five years after it's finished and up and running, the network would be sold to the private sector, under the government's policy.
So, ultimately, it might cost the taxpayer. But taxpayers could end up recovering the cost of the investment. Or, if it's anything like the privatisations of the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas or Telstra, the taxpayer could make a profit on the whole deal.
But what about the interest burden in the meantime? This is the interest that Joyce thinks we will all have to work longer to repay.
The interest on the money that NBN Co. would have to borrow to build the network is estimated by the Treasury to be $1.6 billion over the next four years.
That's real money but let's keep some perspective. It works out at an annual average of 0.1 per cent of the federal budget.
In sum, it's entirely affordable. And it's a vital project for the national future, especially if we want a future beyond the iron ore and coal gouging that is our present best prospect.
Next week the government will ask the Senate to pass a bill that the House of Representatives has already passed. This proposed law for the so-called structural separation of Telstra is a key piece of enabling legislation for the broadband network. It would allow Telstra to add its network to the project. Telstra is in favour of the deal.
The Coalition intends to oppose it, while it claims that it merely wants more information from the government. Joyce unveiled the opposition's real motive last week: "This is the crux of the issue, this is why the government are so sensitive about it and here it is: the [network] is the reason the Labor government is in government.
''That is what they put forward. It is the reason the independents backed them …
"If we pull this card out, if this card falls, the whole show comes down."
So the Coalition will be implacably opposed. The government will need every other vote in the chamber to prevail. The Greens are likely to support it, with some quibbles, and the sole Family First senator, Steve Fielding, has said he is likely to vote yes, too.
This will bring it down to a single senator, the independent Nick Xenophon. He is a reasonable man, he supports the network concept but he is demanding more information from the government. And reasonably enough, too. He wants the government to release the business case for the network and he wants the government to refer the project to the Productivity Commission for analysis. "If the government freezes in giving us information, the [network] will fall over."
Why? Because any further vote probably would be delayed until the newly elected senators take their seats in July. And by then, Telstra says, it will be too late for its shareholders to vote on the deal it has with the government to participate in the network.
This is crunch time. Either the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, or Xenophon will have to yield if the network is to become reality. Xenophon says it won't be him: "There's a lot of irony that we are supposed to be voting on a $43 billion information network in an information vacuum."
The onus is on the government to supply the information. Or the network plan, like the emissions trading scheme of its last term, will collapse. And Labor's credibility will collapse with it.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor.