Thanks Peter Martin for your insight into the dinosaur era, of which of course you're one of them beasts — a small one, I recognise, but one nonetheless... The NBN, is a bit like the harbour bridge... When we finally paid the last 20 cent owed on the damn thing we instantly got slugged for an increase of about 750 per cent and now 1500 per cent for the privilege to cross it... because we had to pay for the construction of a tunnel since the bridge was too small by then... Hello? You with me?... And the bill of the NBN is ONLY 36 billions till at least 2017... There will be delays and additional costs of course... But so what?... Let's do nothing instead or have a camel-designed hybrid that will never deliver the goods as well.

By then, the worse that can happen is that the NBN gets not one single subscribers. The bill would have been about 6 billion a year down the gurgler?... Not really, because even if not one person would subscribe to the NBN, at least the thingy would have employed 15,000 people for about 8 years.

This is a bit less than half of the mining industry workforce... The two have a similitude: they both dig holes except the NBN Co fills its holes with optic cables while the mining industry digs and send the stuff to China et al... Meanwhile some of the optic cable is manufactured in Australia, some is imported from overseas. The Price of the imported stuff was made cheaper by the high aussie dollar...

Hey, Dino Martin, Look at the Snowy Scheme!... A huge employment national program that in return has destroyed rivers and lakes, and produces quite a piddly amount of the electricity we use... A white elephant by all means that served the main purpose of POPULATING Aussieland...

BUT PEOPLE WILL SUBSCRIBE to the NBN. 

Most people already pay between 49 and 100 bux to have "fast" internet... The dodo dial up is a dodo... to have to pay between 100 and 120 bux in a couple of years for a far better service won't make much difference to most people especially to the rich dudes on the North Shore, who are mostly the ones grumbling about the NBN. And no, the old copper network and the foxtel cabling wont be removed, mostly mothballed... unless the price of copper hits the roof... 

Big businesses would have rocks in their heads not to subscribe to the NBN. The future lays in fast more precise communication. If you haven't seen this, you are all idiots. And the fastest delivery of fast information is optic cable. When optic computer speed comes online it would be too late to consider digging furiously and lay cables. There will come a time in about 50 years when the NBN will be near saturation. But hell, by then we might have invented the neutrino super-highway or vibrating elastic bands... 

By all means according to the "Institute of Administration" formula, every cent the government spends on anything can be described as waste... unless it employs an array of Sir Humphrey Appleby like Allen. But it's a "waste" especially if the money ends up in social programs... and not in the pockets of private enterprise in the form of tax breaks and big lunches... Give us a break, Peter Martin... Allen is a dinosaur from the past, who has no vision about the future. 

The NBN will be a success story for the Labor government. That's why all the Liberal (conservative) shock jocks and liberal (conservative) politicians hate the damn thing.... That's why at every opportuny they try hard to destroy it.