By Katharine Murphy
The broadband network will be a long, hard sell, and it's telling Labor is taking it on.
Does it really take one Prime Minister and three cabinet ministers to change a policy light globe? It does when the light globe is the $36 billion national broadband network. The long-awaited business plan for the network was released yesterday by Julia Gillard, Stephen Conroy, Penny Wong and Wayne Swan - rather than the no-frills press conference by a single minister originally advertised, we were given a modest chorus line.
But the ensemble cast, while hastily put together, was more than an abstract piece of set dressing. This project more than any other has proved an organising principle for a government that had fallen dangerously into narrative incoherence. Like it, love it, loathe it, this project is about telling voters what the Gillard government is really about or, more precisely, what it really wants to be about when it plots itself against Labor governments that have preceded it.
Now a couple of disclosures. I have not always been a fan of the NBN, and on the build itself remain somewhat of a sceptic. The government's refusal to submit the project to a cost benefit analysis didn't exactly reassure.
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis
Instinctively, my disposition is to let properly regulated competitive markets do what they do: provide services to consumers. Also, when it comes to sophisticated technology and picking winners, history tells us that governments, lumbering hesitant beasts that they are, are not always the finest judges.
A qualified coming around to the NBN has been a slow process, largely driven by the competition policy principles that rest beneath the whole idea. Without the promise of a national broadband network, the government would not have been able to undo 20 years of terrible policy in telecommunications. John Howard's single greatest economic policy mistake was turning Telstra from a public monopoly to a private one with the capacity to strangle competition and innovation at the retail level, leaving us less well-off for communications services than other comparable nations.
That mistake is now on the road to being rectified through the breaking up of Telstra, the concept the pointy heads call ''structural separation''.
This is significant microeconomic reform, a true landmark for this government - and deep policy reform in this day and age is no small achievement.
The NBN shows us that the government wants to achieve structural reform like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating did in the 1980s, and also achieve capital ''L'' Labor transformational change by investing in economic infrastructure, although it seems modern Labor is more preoccupied with productivity than equity. You will have to have income to access the premium services being provided by the NBN (the dizzyingly fast speeds are $85-plus a month).
Dogged pressing-ahead with the project despite residual controversy also reassures us that this government's well-documented obsession with political risk aversion can be counter-balanced periodically by its desire to do something on a truly large scale.
The NBN project is full of risks. Some of the myriad assumptions in the business case are more than likely flawed. Costs have already blown out and could well again. (Remember when this idea cost $4.7 billion? Now it's $27.5 billion of taxpayers' money.) There may not be sufficient skilled labour to deliver the rollout on time and on budget.
The biggest risk of all involves public perceptions. Voters will be required to be patient, and who but the saints are actually good at that any more? The NBN won't exist in substantial collective reality for a decade. The documents released yesterday indicate that by the time of the next election, only 600,000 homes will have access to the new services. This fact was shielded yesterday behind a more-promising sounding statistic - that the NBN will ''pass'' 1.7 million premises by June 2013.
Does it really take one Prime Minister and three cabinet ministers to change a policy light globe?
The bottom line here is that this a big, complex, controversial project that will take more than five minutes and a sexy sound-bite to deliver in a political age constructed around institutionalised timidity and instant gratification. The NBN project also has a sharp devil's advocate in Malcolm Turnbull, who is now doing something the opposition comprehensively failed to do during the first term of this government - introduce some plausible contestability into this concept.
The attack lines Turnbull has been running (transparency, value for money, whether the technology will be future-proof) are all solid. That said, the opposition also has considerable political interest in projecting an element of doubt into the project by linking it with past failures - such as the botched insulation program and blowouts in the school building scheme - in order to paint a picture of managerial incompetence.
To see it through, the government will require competence in the implementation, close attention to detail, some policy guts and an appetite for controversy - not its collective strong suits to date. It will also, much like the climate change debate over the next 12 months, require co-ordinated advocacy in order to bring the public along with a policy that will take time to reveal its transformative effects.
It is risky, it is difficult and it could all end in tears. But there is something about this project that helps explain the government's incumbency to itself; that helps it tap into a continuum of Labor values in order to assert a character and a political identity that has so far been lacking.
The NBN project, at its heart, dares the government to go for it, and there is something to be said for going for it.
Katharine Murphy is Age national affairs correspondent.
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