Former comms minster Stephen Conroy to leave Parliament Stephen Conroy, the Australian Labor Party Senator who proposed a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) national broadband network (NBN) for Australia, has announced he will leave the Parliament despite being re-elected for a six-year term just two months ago. “When you resent being in Canberra because you are missing your daughter's …
"Conroy therefore rates the NBN “my greatest contribution.”"
Had it gone ahead as originally planned, he could well have been correct. What is currently envisaged isn't what was proposed.
I remember back a few years when someone commented that the NBN (as was) would have been way over budget, very late and we would look back in the years ahead how we ever got on without it.
His censorship ideas, however, are well gone.
On a slightly different matter, what's changed between the election and now? Surely his kid's soccer training was there before the last election? Fred Taxpayer can ill afford more by-elections.
You would not feel like that if you found out you were on the three year NBN Plan. What is that three year NBN plan, you will get exactly jack shite for at least three years and that's it, the end and nothing beyond that, great bloody plan, whoot, thank you Malcolm Turnbull (whilst other more political connected areas with already good ADSL get FTP).
But they gave their buddies in News Corp billions of dollars for a shite going to be scrapped at a loss network and protected their profits from competition for a bunch more years, by far the biggest theft and fraud in Australian history.
And before broadband >90% of the internet connections would have been dial-up!! Whats your point, the fact is the services and economical benefits a true FTTH Network would have provided will now never be available in our generation. Its a sad fact that in 25-30 years will look back on and ask what were they thinking.
Simon, only a C+ for your answer.. Any Senate replacement must be approved by a joint sitting of the relevant state parliament and given the school yard antics are not limited to Federal politics Victoria also has a challenge that the replacement may go unapproved until the Labor Head of the Upper house returns from a six month suspension.
So process is.. Labor Party Committee selects who, the nomination goes to the Victorian State Govt for approval at which point it is submitted to the GG for swearing in. GG doesn't get to approve the process is governed by "Constitution Alteration (Senate Casual Vacancies) 1977" that amended Part 2, section 15 of the constitution.
"Fred Taxpayer can ill afford more by-elections."
No need for a by-election in the Senate. The convention is that the party from which the retiring Senator belongs is entitled to nominate their own new Senator -who, from memory is appointed by the State Premier. Exactly how this would affect the new Senator's term of office after a double dissolution is something I have no idea about (do they go to the bottom of the line and serve a three year term or are they entitled to the term that the original incumbent was serving?) ... but a by-election isn't necessary.
On Conroy's Communications contributions - as you point out ... a bit of a mixed bag.
The NBN could have been Concroy's legacy but instead it has turned into a missed opportunity. Greater than 80% (and rising) of fibre connections are 25Mbps or slower. On a FTTN network this would be laudible, but on a FTTP network that is capable of 1Gbps it shoudl be considered a failure.
If Labor had built a network without speed tiers then FTTN would not have been an option. It may be that after Telstra blocked Labor's original FTTN plan Labor were never able to re-evaluate what FTTP could deliver and so left many of the same low goals in place.
Conroy was more of a tapper than a tappee given the sway his faction has.
I'm a bit mixed really. NBN; brilliant idea in its original guise. Metadata retention? Made as much sense as his red underwear gag except it is dangerous and expensive.
I would have really liked the parliamentary raid privilege issue to have been resolved though.
It's a bit more complicated than that. It was Brandis in that Brandis introduced the bill that eventually passed. On that note, he demonstrably showed a lack of judgement that will come back to bite us in the future, so definitely no free pass for him.
Indirectly, the ALP is tarred with the same brush here. There are times when you could argue that positions were changed by compromise and negotiation. For example, a party may claim to be against a particular service cut/tax hike but negotiate it through in such a way that the constituency that they are concerned about is compensated for that change. Sometimes it is a pragmatic decision to take a lesser of two evils on offer. That wasn't the case here though. The alternative "do nothing" was indeed a live choice and the preferred position of a significant minority of both major parties.
More directly though, there were definitely rumblings back in 2010 and 2012.
Here is a link to a senate investigation on the matter.
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2012-2013/DataRetention
So Conroy is knee deep in it, even if he himself didn't pull the trigger.
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