Telstra still appears to have the NBN door open for it

Even though the federal government has said it will consider the 90 percent proposal laid down by Telstra, Stephen Conroy is still asking the voters to trust the government when it promises that the National Broadband Network will deliver 98 percent coverage.

In Canberra recently reporters grilled the communications minister over whether the government would accept what looked to be a non-compliant ‘proposal’ from Telstra. The promise of just 90 percent coverage across Australia was one of the key issues on paper as this contradicted the promise given by the Labor government of 98 percent, which was also one of the 18 key objectives that prospective bidders had to meet and was written into the RFP document.

Conroy said “Telstra’s proposal will be considered in exactly the same way as all of the other five proposals,”

Although this response seemed to raise more question regarding the bid than it did answers. A reporter asked “Telstra’s clearly non-compliant bid seeks to only cover 90 percent of the population, can’t it be ruled out now?”

Another reporter asked “Is the 98 percent coverage negotiable?”

These questions were referred by Conroy to the reviewing of the bids and the entering of discussions ‘with the proposer’ in the next few months, which had been tasked to an expert panel.

Conroy persisted in refusing to answer the questions saying “I can’t comment on the individual bids. That’s the role of the expert panel. A whole range of claims and counter claims are going to be made about the contents of various proposals,” said Conroy. The expert panel’s job is to sift through that.”

A guarantee to the government of a commercial return in the $4.7 billion it is investing in the project has put the mysterious Acacia consortium in a strong running position. And these kind of promises have been certainly not been coming from Telstra.

Conroy said “We’ve always said that we’d be expecting a commercial return, there is no argument. I don’t think anyone has questioned that at any stage.”