Peter Gallagher

Although details are still sketchy, Henry Ergas points out that in one of his last acts, Rudd appar­ently sad­dled us with a return to a government-sanctioned oli­gop­oly at the heart of our telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket. Worse still, it will be taxpayer-funded.

“Cen­tral to those out­comes is the heads of agree­ment, which has two basic com­po­nents. A first, val­ued at some $5bn, is a pay­ment for NBN Co’s use of Telstra’s infra­struc­ture. Fair enough. Given the deci­sion, how­ever ques­tion­able, to build the NBN, let it not dupli­cate facil­i­ties it could share. The remain­ing $6bn, how­ever, is deeply prob­lem­atic, for at its heart is an agree­ment to sup­press com­pe­ti­tion.” Extract from We’ll pay dearly for this NBN folly | The Australian