There are still 4 odd hours left in Monday August 13, 2012 and it will not close without a critique of another article published today in The Australian newspaper. For a critique on a front page article see post below.
Now to the two articles in today's Australian on last weeks announcement of changes to the NBN budget. The first one in the news reporting section, on page 3, starts with the headline, "Change to NBN rollout a $1.5bn hit". Again, why is it a "hit"? The change is $1.5bn in extra capital costs to extend connections to all houses rather than just those who have opted for a connection. This is a business decision and is expected to lead to an increase in sign-ups and returns.
Articles on the NBN are under a running sub-heading called "NBN Watch, how your billions are being spent". "Watch" is a loaded term, and is known more in situations like "Cult Watch", and "Neighbourhood Watch" and suggests that what is being watched is bad. Why do all of these suspect associations put me in mind of the phrase, subliminal message? An objective report would read more like, "NBN Observed, the pros and cons of the largest infrastructure project in Australian history".
To write, "How your billions are being spent" is loaded. "How your money is being spent" would be more balanced. "Billions" is small minded, obvious and biased. You know as well as I know that the hidden meaning is, "Billions are being wasted", when in fact it matters not how large the budget is, what matters is, is it a fair and reasonable amount to build an NBN, and, how high is the return. But News Limited is biased and only wants to focus on cost, to put the NBN in a negative light. It is not an objective observer, it is not fulfilling its role as a member of the forth estate, but is partisan on a global basis, from Fox News in the US, to Phone taping in the UK. We are supposed to automatically accept that billions must mean waste, and feel like a dill if we say that it might just be a large national infrastructure project that costs a lot, like the railways or the electricity network or the water system or the sewage or the roads (all the recent tunnels alone cost about $40bn), or the schools or the hospitals or the mining projects or skyscrapers (the Crown Casino on its own cost $2bn to build).
Note these two consecutive sentence paragraphs: "...Mr Quigley (NBN Co chief) said the cost of that change was not 'billions, but it's not a few hundred million either'". Then this: "But speaking...yesterday, the NBN chief...confirmed that the change could cost as much as $1.5bn". Am I missing something here? $1.5bn sits quite happily between "Not billions but...not a few hundred million...". So why the "But" and the "confirmed", and the "as much as"? The piece leaves the impression that somehow he has been caught out miss-quoting the amount. This is subtle, spurious, confected and wrong. It leaves you feeling petty to point out such small irregularities, but The Australian publishes many articles that consist of a series of skewed impressions that add up to outright bias, that's how they are getting away with it, so these small irregularities have to be pointed out, one after the other.
In this and in another article in the past couple of days The Australian has used the terminology, "opt out" to describe the new NBN policy. It has given the impression that a householder is somehow being pushed into signing up, that they have to take action to stop the connection. There is no opting out. The new "drop build" policy is simply that all houses will be connected to the NBN. Like electricity a householder would have to choose to connect and contacts the company to do so. The only difference is that now, if a householder does choose to connect, the process will be faster and simpler as the fibre optics are already running to the house. They do not have to "opt out" of anything and for The Australian to say that they do is dishonest.
Another thing The Australian does is obfuscates the good news. It is very good at this. Whether positioning it at the end of the article because they know that a lot of the readers do not get to the end of the article, or wedging it in between bad news, or diluting it in a complex sentence. For example, in this article we get this in paragraph number eight: "While NBN Co expects the new build method to increase the number of people who connect to the NBN, the more expensive practice has been cited as one of the key reasons for a $1.4bn increase in the capital costs of the 10-year infrastructure project, to $37.4bn".
What we have in that sentencing is the swamping of the good news with verbiage, a change in terminology, and a long and a hard to understand sentence. The only time that the positive in this story is stated is in this sentence, that the NBN expects that by changing the build method a lot more customers will sign up, thereby increasing the return on investment to taxpayers. But that message is dissolved in this confusing sentence, and is immediately followed by more of the bad, the cost. And the terminology changes: all of a sudden we have the "build drop" becoming "more expensive practice". How is it now a "practice". This seems strange, and is confusing.
The second article on this issue occurs in the commentary section of the paper, on page 12, and is written by Henry Ergas. This is where The Australian, who cannot be decent in the news section, goes all out and just becomes the opposition. The headline is, "PM IN ANOTHER FINE GOLD-PLATED MESS", and the subtitle is, "Senator Conroy and his leader are tangled up in cable, poles and wires". The article then begins by comparing them to Laurel and Hardy. This guy cannot restrain himself. Seriously, three negative, clichéd analogies before he has even got started, and a large unflattering cartoon of the Prime Minister and the Senator accompanying the article to illustrate the Laurel and Hardy theme. The rest of the article purports to be a rebuff to the Senator saying that if Malcolm Turnbull were to have built the Sydney harbour Bridge it would only have two lanes. But he goes on a long discourse into the history of the planning and construction of the bridge and does not rebuff anything. He then just ends the article by stating that the NBN is expensive. Again, just mentioning the costs seems to be all that it takes to call it a contribution to the debate.
I have not done any research on it and I don't know if anyone could predict it but what will the benefits be of an NBN? I reckon, off the top of my head that it would be like building a national railway network. You know that it is going to assist several industries a lot, and many a bit, and some not at all. You know that by having much of the population using high speed internet it will affect the high-tech culture of the country. You know that there will be many interlinked effects and economic multiplier effects, but nobody can really estimate with certainty the full effects of the National System. It may be a very good national investment. $40bn may actually be a reasonable spend. The Australian does not know any better, so why the constant denigrating of the proposal?
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