KEY POINTS:
I've just turned off Parliament TV to silence John Key who was approaching the end of a fairly sloppy and unconvincing speech in response to today's budget.
Amid jeers from the opposition benches and cheers from his own colleagues, Key said Labour was a government that was happy to "meander around in the past" but that National would take New Zealand forward for young people and invest in fast broadband "so they can be connected to the world".
All the shabbily delivered rhetoric aside, Labour has finally revealed its response to National's proposed $1.5 billion plan to subsidise a fibre-optic broadband network. It's an underwhelming response at best as TUANZ chief executive Ernie Newman points out.
This is what the Government has in store in terms of broadband infrastructure investment - $325 million of operating expenditure allocated to a Broadband Investment Fund to be spent over five years.
This appears to be modelled on the relatively successful Broadband Challenge fund which dished out funding to organisations around the country for regional broadband initiatives.
The BIF as will be known will offer contestable funding for more ambitious broadband projects aimed at getting high-speed internet access to businesses and organisations such as universities, schools and hospitals.
There's $15 million of capital expenditure to contribute to construction of an undersea fibre optic cable link to Australia.
A Digital Development Council formed to provide policy advice to the Government will be funded to the tune of $500,000.
The KAREN network which links the country's universities and research institutions gets a funding boost to the tune of $7.8 million and there's targeted funding in areas like health ($60 million), education ($45.5 million) and to further develop the Government Shared Network (50 million).
All up the Government has committed around $500 million today to broadband infrastructure investment most of it to be distributed in the same way past funding in this area has - through contestable grants and through direct funding of hospitals, schools and government departments.
It's certainly not visionary, ambitious. That level of funding isn't going to change the broadband landscape. It is incremental change that runs the risk of spawning numerous projects that overlap and don't share a common outcome. But is it more realistic than John Key's plan to get high-speed internet to 75 per cent of the country through a public-private partnership?
How well managed this funding allocation is and how the regulatory regime and the operational separation of Telecom progresses will determine whether the cheques written out for broadband investment in the next few years amount to any improvement.
Labour never indicated it would try to outspent National on broadband, but surely the government could have come up with something more inspiring to convince us that growth and innovation is actually valued in this country.
What do you think of the allocated spending on broadband?
