More on Minchin

Senator Minchin has had another go at Conroy over the NBN, this time in the Oz. It was, however, rather delightful that the link to the article on Breakfast Politics was Conroy should roll over to Telstra.

That was exactly the thrust of the article, and included the claim that Telstra had been excluded for "the most trivial of reasons". So now we know that Minchin's stance is that OPEL should proceed despite not meeting the standards of the contract and that Telstra's proposal for the NBN should be considered despite not meeting the requirements of the tender.

It is worrying that his parliamentary biography shows that he holds a BEc and LLB and was a solicitor before commencing his party positions. However, given he was only 24 when he started being a full time politician, maybe he didn't get to practice much law.

Certainly his experience as a Minister in the Howard Government wouldn't have taught him much about process.

His article concludes;

Before it is too late, Conroy should go back to the drawing board, sit down with all key relevant players and plot a more sensible, practical and realistic course to upgrade our nation's broadband capability.

It is disappointing that Senator Minchin is unprepared to take his share of the blame for this mess. The deal he and the Howard Government weere trying to pull off - OPEL for Optus, regulatory change requested by Telstra - would have been a disaster. The flawed tender and its idiotic concept of "competitive tension" is entirely built on the former Gvernment's approach which was to tender for policy.

The bottom line is that if the coalition had spent more time thinking about telco policy rather than how to maximise sale proceeds, we would not be in any kind of mess.