The really scary thing about the broadband plan is The Age absolutely loves it

STEPHEN Conroy gets cold feet as the Yarra anarcho-syndicalist collective gives the thumbs-up.

This he can take. Chanticleer in The Australian Financial Review:

THE National Broadband Network corporate plan is unlike anything you would ever see in the board papers of an Australian company director because no management would dare put up a project proposal that had returns below the cost of capital.

Water off a duck's back . . . the AFR's editorial yesterday:

THE business plan does nothing to alleviate the real concerns of many senior business people and economists. It is absurd that the largest infrastructure project in the nation's history is being launched without a proper cost-benefit analysis. Yet the Gillard government is plunging headlong into this expensive folly because the support of independent MPs in parliament depends on it, and its flagging poll support could not stand another big policy backflip. From a policy perspective, it is a depressing note on which to end the year.

Pah! Economist Peter Cox on ABC Radio National's Breakfast:

THIS is the scariest business plan I've ever seen in my life. After 10 years of this plan it's going to be $36 billion in the red. When a business plan relies on the future we call that a hockey stick.

He would say that . . . Terry McCrann in the Herald Sun:

THE laughing should start right now, and not let up until [Stephen] Conroy and [Mike] Quigley and their NBN are -- figuratively -- tarred and feathered and run out of town like all snake oil salesmen. Remember what the government had to do to get these "optimistic" numbers: that the NBN will only lose in real terms $1 billion or so a year, every year of its life.

Et tu, Adele? Ferguson in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald:

THE Gillard government's much-awaited business plan for its National Broadband Network is three parts puff and two parts smoke and mirrors, with a pinch of fact thrown in. If it fails, the government can kiss its increasingly shaky credibility goodbye.

Steady on . . . Katharine Murphy in The Age:

The NBN shows us that the government wants to achieve structural reform like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating did in the 1980s. 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, at its heart, dares the government to go for it, and there is something to be said for going for it.

Lucky no one reads it. The Age editorial yesterday:

HOWEVER faltering the progress of the Gillard government may have been in some other respects, the NBN continues to demonstrate that this is a government with a vision. A cost-benefit analysis, however, would seek to present a highly detailed picture of the NBN, extrapolated from what can be known now. That would be a pointless exercise for a major infrastructure project such as the NBN, the largest in Australia's history. This is a prudent plan, for a visionary project.

Member for Maranoa James Page lays the groundwork for the NBN business plan, September 12, 1905:

THE large centres of population in the eastern coastal districts have every facility in the way of postal, telegraphic and telephonic services for rapid communication; but it is very difficult to obtain anything in this way for country districts. What is wanted is telephonic communication between Cooper's Creek and the nearest telegraph office, some 40 miles away. I do not say the line would pay handsomely from the start but the township it would serve is on one of the main stock routes of Queensland and settlement is increasing. I shall not be content until I am assured that western Queensland will get a square deal, and, to test the feeling of the committee, I move that the item "NSW -- Construction and Extension of Telegraph Lines, Instruments and Material, pound stg. 12,000" be reduced by pound stg. 1.

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