World wide wedge
Labor clearly wants to make the potential privatisation of the NBN an election battleground. But do voters really care deeply about the issue?
Back when Anthony Albanese was opposition leader, one of his sharper attack lines against Scott Morrison was to accuse the then-prime minister of introducing “wedge-islation” rather than legislation. By this, he meant Morrison would introduce bills not for reform purposes but instead to wedge Labor politically.
Albanese could now be accused of doing the exact same thing after introducing a bill this week to guarantee that the National Broadband Network (NBN) will remain in government hands.
Considering the Coalition has no imminent plans to privatise the $51 billion network, the move appeared to come out of nowhere. But it dominated Question Time on Wednesday, with the government using almost all of its ‘Dorothy Dixers’ to hammer the point home that the NBN would not be sold on its watch.
In 2020, the Morrison government declared the NBN “built and fully operational”, but it stopped short of commencing a sale process for the wholesale broadband monopoly. Labor went to the last election pledging to keep the network in public hands, but there was no commitment to introduce new legislation to enshrine that.
