The unlit, unpaved road to nowhere

I tried to disconnect from work related topics on my vacation as much as I could. I didn't post on this blog, I only superficially followed what was happening on the various tech mailing lists I participate in, etc.

There's one topic that I couldn't shut out though and that was the impact of the result of the Australian national elections on the NBN. That topic made it into the mainstream press here in France, and so I couldn't help but think about it.

Ironically, during the last few days of the campaign, someone on the Fiberevolution mailing list pointed to an interesting editorial by Paul Krugman in the NYT related to government and infrastructure, and I thought these two seemingly different topics regarding two different countries were really one and the same.

The Krugman editorial is entitled America Goes Dark and it dissects how the anti-government rhethoric in North America has led to a severe lack of investment or even disvestment in public infrastructure. Krugman isn't talking specifically about broadband. In fact, his most striking example (and the one that made my jaw drop) is how local governments are destroying roads they can't afford to maintain:

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

In a certain sense, this is one of the choices at the heart of the Australian election too. No election is focused on a single issue, and clearly the NBN was only one of the topics Australians had to arbitrate on. My understanding is that the candidates' personalities and recent public appearances may have weighed a lot too in how voters chose (just as in every election everywhere).

Still, one of the strongest points of divergence between the two platforms in Australia was the NBN. Australia and New Zealand were forerunners in making this topic a political issue. Deep down, the issue is also about curbing public spending versus public ambition. It's about paving more roads than perhaps the country needs today versus accepting gravel roads or, in some instances, no roads at all.

To be fair, even though I'm no expert on Australian politics by any stretch of the imagination, it felt - seen from abroad - as if the Labor government didn't exactly handle the NBN thing as well as they could have over the last couple of years. The political process was protracted and long, the technical choices were (and still are to some extent) unclear and the alignment between a fairly clear vision and a somewhat muddied execution looks far from optimal.

Ironically, it looks like the continuation of the NBN plan may very well be the issue that decides the formation of the next government. Parliament is hung until three independants and one green decide which party to side with. The three independents have natural leanings towards the opposition, but the issue that largely determined their original decision to become independant was the privatisation of Telstra which they opposed. They are, therefore, largely pro-NBN. The green MP has natural leanings towards labor and is also seen as pro-NBN.

Ultimately, as argued by Jock Given in this fascinating piece entitled We're All Tech Heads Now, it may not matter which party governs: if continuation of the NBN is a condition for the independants to side with either party, the broadband policy will have to continue more or less as it has in the last couple of years.

The choice facing Australia is between an unlit road (quite literally) that trusts a private market that has largely failed a significant proportion of the Australian population until now and a lit road that requires heavy investment and is paved with uncertainty.

But it's also a more ideological and philosophical question on the role of governments in public welfare. As Krugman puts it, Americans have increasingly decided to believe that anything governments did was inherently bad. Will Australians go down the same route ?

I know where I'm standing, and this is why I say to Australians: don't choose the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere!