Opposition plan to flush out crucial government data was two years in the making and involved an innocuous amendment to a Coalition bill
It seemed like an innocuous amendment to an obscure piece of legislation.
The biggest hurdle, however, was the lack of data. Other than NBN Co’s website – where you can plug in an address and see the technology type – there was no Australia-wide data on what technology was being used, house by house and suburb by suburb. The Labor source says the Coalition didn’t raise any objections. The opposition wasn’t sure whether the government understood, at the time, the true intention of slipping the amendment into the bill.website. Anyone could now overlay maps of which technology type was used in every part of Australia.The data allowed Labor to do a spatial density analysis of homes within fibre-to-the-node areas and determine where it was most cost-effective to upgrade the connections.
The opposition pledged to move 3.5m premises in total from FttN to fibre-to-the-home at a cost of $5.3bn. Beyond that 3.5m figure, the spatial density dropped off quickly and it was much more expensive to upgrade, the data obtained via Labor’s legislative amendment showed. Guardian Australia contacted Fletcher’s office for comments and was directed to NBN Co. As a government-owned business, it said it was unable to comment while in the government was in caretaker mode.
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