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Blogwatch: Naming the elephants #1
Naming the elephants #1
Posted by Clare Curran on June 29th, 2010
Right now it feels as though there’s a few elephants in the room that need to be named.
Today’s is Telecom and the relationship it has to the Govt’s $1.5 million ultrafast broadband rollout.
There’s currently a tender process underway for the big contract with Govt to do the rollout. That process has a nominal deadline of 30 June for the initial partner selection process and contracts to be completed by Crown Fibre Holdings, the Govt entity set up to manage the UFB process.
Despite the Minister saying he was confident that the timetable remained on track, it’s hard to see how. Because concurrently we have the extraordinary situation of Telecom deciding whether to separate its business in order to qualify as a UFB bidder. It’s obvious to everyone that they desperately want to and need to be in the running. And that the Govt expects them to be in.
Meanwhile the Govt is pretending that it’s oblivious to Telecom’s very public twisting and turning. Until last Thursday, when Steven Joyce came before the Commerce Select Committee and acknowledged that the Government has not ruled out taking an equity stake in Telecom’s network arm, Chorus.
Joyce has this uncanny ability to make extraordinary statements sound ho hum. But it wasn’t ho hum. For the first time he said the Govt would be prepared to invest in Chorus in new fibre infrastructure. The DomPost reported on this exchange last Friday. Update: There have been several stories today on the liklihood of delays.
I said after the select committee that I believed the tendering process was now in question and could have been undermined. I’m saying that again.
This is public money. Crown Fibre Holdings are trying to manage a tendering process under very difficult circumstances. But the public has no idea what’s going on.
The process is approaching a farce. It’s being called a farce privately by commentators and other bidders.
It’s clear that Telecom’s involvement in UFB is nto a matter of if, but how. And it’s time to call it what it is. Steven Joyce can’t get away with pretending that the Govt has no interest in what Telecom is doing re structural separation. Perhaps it’s time to call a halt to the bidding process until Telecom works out what it’s going to do.
Getting ultrafast broadband right is in the national interest. Let’s not have a situation where there’s a major cloud over the decision on who got the contract to lay it out.
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/06/29/naming-the-elephants-1/
ENDS
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