This takes the old charades of turning the first sod, donning the firefighter/hardhat/service uniform to a new level of surreality (is that a word) doesn't it? Now you are the investigative reporter reporter on government policy.
---- Turnbull is also running a fallacy when he claims that the estimates of the value of the NBN were too high. The dollars that can be extracted from the punters is not logically or practically equivalent to the value of something to its users. This is particularly true of shared public resources (how much would you pay to breathe air?) for some fairly simple reasons. The actual value of the NBN - what economists call utility - is very difficult to estimate because it there are so many potential future uses that cannot be reliable estimated, valued or even known. If the value of the NBN is the total dollars that that people are willing to pay to swap from ADSL right now, it is not worth doing. The job of government is to look intelligently at utility and risk in "big picture" ways that the average person can't or won't. Otherwise, why have one. - Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
