It’s become quite clear which tactics the Liberal-National Coalition will be using to stop Australia’s National Broadband Network. In the absence of any realistic alternative plan or a technical argument against the NBN, they have stooped to what every politician knows best – The smear campaign.
It began back in August when outspoken Liberal pollie, Andrew Robb, described the NBN Company’s staff as “talentless”, and the organisation “incapable of attracting quality staff”. A cheap, ill-informed slur which is typical of Robb, who has a habit of resorting to FUD when he can’t find any facts to support his agenda. It probably backfired though, given that just about every IT news site (and even a few mainstream media publications) quickly ridiculed his statements, pointing to the fact that the NBN’s staff were in fact highly qualified and respected industry heavyweights.
The NBN Co’s Kevin Brown noted that more than half of NBN’s top 100 staff were senior veterans of global telecommunication companies. Over 50% held two university degrees and there were also 4 doctorates and 27 engineers amongst the management team.
Even NBN opponents jumped to their defence, with Pipe Networks founder Bevan Slattery describing NBN Co as a “brains trust” who have “really got their you-know-what together”.
Fast-forward to December 2010, and the Coalition belatedly becomes aware of bribery charges levelled against a few Alcatel-Lucent subsidiaries between 2001 and 2006. I’ll bet Abbott & Co are kicking themselves that they didn’t pick this up when Alcatel announced it (along with the dismissal of those responsible) in their 2008 annual report! What finally tipped them off was the United States SEC announcing the fines of $137M that Alcatel-Lucent would pay for the crimes.
Why was this so exciting for Abbott, Turnbull and Robb? Because the NBN’s acclaimed CEO, Michael Quigley and their CFO, Jean-Pascal Beaufret both held senior positions at Alcatel during the period of the offences. The fact they had nothing to do with the rogue actions of a couple of morons working for company subsidiaries didn’t dent the Libs’ enthusiasm one little bit. The fact that the SEC were so convinced of their innocence that they didn’t even seek to interview the pair mattered even less. Like sharks circling a hapless swimmer, Turnbull and Robb smelt blood and saw a chance to finally sink their teeth into the project that cost them the 2010 federal election.
The initial attack came from Malcolm Turnbull, but he became suddenly silent and was quickly replaced by Robb. A curious move, considering that opposing the NBN is Turnbull’s responsibility. What could have caused such a rapid and unexpected withdrawal?
And then the answer came, courtesy of the #nbn tag twitter stream. Turns out that during Turnbull’s 3-year position as a global Partner at the massive investment bank Goldman-Sachs, the company broke numerous laws relating to insider trading, laddering and other financial fraud. Resulting in numerous prosecutions (and fines totalling hundreds of millions of dollars) from…. wait for it… the SEC! (Links here and here and here and here) I guess Malcolm found it just a tiny bit hypocritical to attack Quigley when he was in an almost identical position himself, and so left Robb to do the dirty work.
And dirty it was. Of course there were the expected inferences that Quigley must have known what was going on (after all, we all know that the 2IC of every major corporation knows everything that his 100,000 employees are up to). However, there were also Robb’s outright lies, like telling a couple of radio audiences that Alcatel had been made the “sole supplier” of telco equipment to NBN Co. Apparently Robb’s first rule when smearing is “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”. The fact is that NBN equipment contracts have gone to several providers, including contracts to Alcatel-Lucent’s biggest rivals, Nokia-Siemens (A$400Million) and Cisco Systems (A$10Million).
Interestingly, Opposition leader Tony Abbott didn’t mind jumping on the bandwagon, despite facing a bribery scandal of his own. Worse, one of Abbott’s own MPs has tried to secure a $12million kickback for brokering a coal deal in Queensland. One wonders why Abbott considers Quicgley responsible for the corrupt conduct of a subsidiary employee, but doesn’t consider himself responsible for the corrupt actions of a senior Liberal MP whom he personally endorsed?
No doubt we can look forward to at least a couple more years of lies, smear and FUD from the technological incompetents at the Coalition, who are becoming increasingly confused about how to oppose the almost universally-wanted NBN. The only question is: Will they finally wake up and let NBN Co get on with it? Or will the coalition broadband policy comprise a piece of string and a couple of tin cans long after the rest of the world has left us in the dust?
