Your quick guide to NBN under the Coalition

There’s been an endless stream of news reports around the NBN since the change of government. It’s hard to sort fact from fiction, rumour from reportage and announcement from anecdote. So here’s a round up of what the new government has actually done so far to implement its promise to totally revamp Labor’s ambitious fibre to the home plan.

In his new role as communications minister Malcolm Turnbull’s first formal move to implement the FTTN policy was to announce, on 24 September, that he and finance minister Mathias Cormann had issued NBN Co with an interim ‘Statement of Expectations’ directing it to complete a strategic review within 60 days. Turnbull also announced plans for an independent audit of the NBN project, but gave no details.

Nor has he made any commitment to a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN, something the Coalition lobbied for consistently while in Opposition.

The Sydney Morning Herald report on 25 September “Despite repeatedly calling for the Productivity Commission to conduct the NBN cost/benefit analysis while in opposition, the Abbott government now seems unlikely to use it.”

It quoted Turnbull as saying “There are some issues with the Productivity Commission … their chairman [Peter Harris] is the former head of the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.” Therefore, he argued, The Commission would ''in effect be conducting an inquiry into policy that had been, in a large part, designed by its [current] chairman.”

The statement of expectations essentially required NBN Co to maintain ‘business as usual’ and to continue rolling out FTTP until the review and the audit had been completed. It said that the goals of the transition period should be to: “avoid service disruption for consumers; minimise impact on the construction industry and employment, with the objective of a smooth as possible change to the new approach; and achieve the less costly and speedier rollout objectives as seamlessly as possible.”

Turnbull also, effectively, sacked most of the board of NBN Co, including chair Siobhan McKenna (they were asked to offer their resignations). He appointed Dr Ziggy Switkowski, a former CEO of both Telstra and Optus, as executive chair of NBN Co. The founding CEO, Mike Quigley announced in July that he would resign as soon as a replacement could be found. Switkowski will hold the CEO role only until a permanent replacement for Quigley is appointed.

That was Turnbull’s last announcement. Most of the running since then has been made by NBN Co. The company announced on 17 October that it had issued a request for proposal “to a select number of consultants” for consultancy services to support the review process.

A week later they were duly announced. Deloitte was chosen to provide governance and the program management office services “to ensure the strategic review fits within the parameters and tight deadline for submission set by the Government.” KordaMentha was chosen to “contribute to the analysis of the current NBN operational and financial performance” and the Boston Consulting Group to “participate in the review of the timing, financials and product offers under alternative models of delivering very fast broadband.”

The strategic review is to be headed by former Telstra executive JB Rousselet, whose appointment as head of strategy and transformation had been announced two days earlier.

And finally, in what seems like an attempt to hit a moving target, the ACCC has set in train moves to change NBN Co’s Special Access Undertaking (SAU), part of the framework that governs the price and other terms upon which NBN Co will supply services over its fibre, wireless and satellite networks to telecommunications companies. It will operate until 2040.

According to the ACCC, the SAU “will ensure that prices for each of NBN Co’s products do not increase by more than CPI minus 1.5 percent per year [until 2040].”

The changes include new provisions preventing NBN Co from making variations to any existing product that reduce the functionality, performance or features of that product.

ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, said that any major change in the nature of the NBN, such as switching to fibre to the node, would not impact the new SAU. “Most of the commitments in the SAU are technology neutral and will apply even with a significant change in network design,” he said. “If NBN Co wishes to vary the undertaking in the future in light of any new directions from the government, this can be accommodated.”

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