Australia’s opposition yesterday pledged to scrap an ambitious national broadband network in favor of a cheaper patchwork of services, but critics condemned the move.
The opposition coalition said if elected this month, it would replace the government’s A$43 billion (US$39.4 billion) fiber optic network with a A$6.3 billion “backbone” to be used by competing telecom firms.
“We make no apology for not spending 43 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money running fiber down every street,” said Tony Smith, the shadow communications minister.
The plan involves spending A$2 billion on fixed wireless networks across the huge country and another A$750 million to allow homes to receive high-speed Internet.
Other homes would receive the Net via fixed lines or by satellite, connecting 97 percent of homes by 2017 with a minimum speed of 12 megabits per second.
The plan would replace the government’s initiative to wire 93 percent of homes with high-speed fiber optic cable capable of up to 100 megabits per second.
Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company, said there was a fundamental and philosophical difference between the coalition and Labor plans.
“They think they can take an incremental approach and gradually get better at fixing these problems by targeting certain things, whereas the ALP [Australian Labor Party] has moved for root and branch reform,” government and corporate affairs spokesman Maha Krishnapillai said. “It’s a lot less money but we’ll get a lot less for it as well.”
Telecom analyst Paul Budde said the opposition’s plan had some merits but “lacks a vision and a strategy for the future.”
“It is like having many parts of a car spread out on the floor, with no plan on how to put it all together,” he said.
He said ineptness when the conservatives were last in power had left Australia “at the bottom of the international broadband ladder” and the policy would take the nation backwards.
Smith said the Liberal/National plan would see “97 percent of the population has a base line minimum 12 megabits per second service [mbps] peak speed” by 2016.
By contrast, the ruling Labor party plans to deliver 100mbps to 93 percent of the population, with the remaining 7 percent to get speeds of up to 12mbps using wireless and satellite, by 2017.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the coalition plan would “consign Australia to the digital dark ages, destroy jobs and risk our economy for decades.”
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a campaign pledge yesterday to buy back billions of liters of water from irrigators and feed it back into rivers to ensure their healthy flow in a region where 40 percent of the nation’s food is produced.
Gillard said her government aimed to increase water flows where years of drought have left rivers and storage basins at low levels and water evaporating away in the heat.
“We will buy water as necessary from willing sellers to get the water going down the river to restore the river to health,” she told reporters in Adelaide.
Water rights are managed by state governments, which award licenses to farms and other industries for their share of water from rivers. The federal government is compelled to buy back some of that water when the river levels dwindle below critical levels.
The government has already bought 900 billion liters of water at a cost of A$1.4 billion since starting the buyback program in 2008.
Gillard said the budget had another A$1.7 billion for water purchases. The amount of extra water needed and the cost will not be known until after the Aug. 21 national election.
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