Yes black out is SA shows just how good private business works for essential services.
Rolling out national infrastructure like the NBN is absolutely required, and no private company would have any interests in providing the coverage we require. Look at mobile phone coverage, great in the city and pretty ordinary in the bush.

Just mindlessly saying private enterprise would do it cheaper doesn't get us an actual solution.

So, what's wrong with government monopolies David?

Affordable irrigation and gas prices that were 15-25% of the current (privatized) fee charges? The Japanese are paying considerably es for our gas than we are!

David, are you worried we might see the reemergence of vast commission housing estates and with them a return to affordable housing and or rents? Shock horror!

Why people might once again be able to buy affordable housing, or even old age pensioners may once again be able to affordably heat or cool their homes? And that'd be disastrous wouldn't it?

Yes Government monopolies are a bad thing for the unscrupulous, lazy investor, who believes the world owes, him/her a living!

At the end of the day we were vastly better off with government monopolies, affordable electricity, world's safest airline, even more affordable gas and housing! And all the profits retained in OUR ECONOMY!

The only private enterprise model that does that is the co-op! And the only private enterprise, (yes that's what they are) free market model that largely survived the Great Depression largely intact! Even as vast corporations founded the world over!

Better government monopolies, rather than the foreign owned price gouging captive market monopolies, we've seemingly traded them for, and with them, so also our economic sovereignty!

Are you batting for the other non resident foreign team David? Or just manifestly moribund?
Alan B.

There is one simple identifiable cause of this debacle...Abbott and Turnbull!

Had the FTTP been allowed to roll out unhindered, yes it would have been slower but every customer would have had the world's best technology (where practicable) and the NBN would have had a single technology to refine, and maintain for the next 100+ years.
Instead we have adhoc wireless, hybrid systems with degraded overall performance and failing FTTN that offers abysmal performance and worse, high maintenance demands.

And where are the fabled cost savings?

Those two should forever be remembered as historically the most destructive politicians in Australia's short history.

You know Peter King might almost be right for once.

If we had left the KRudd plan untouched we might have all had the best of 2001 technology, no later than 2101. Wouldn't that be great! Well it would if we could afford it, & the world had stopped turning.

Australia's NBN is an absolute balls up. It should never have wandered from the original plan. Now we have a hotchpotch slow and terrible system that is forever going to have problems. That little bit of copper wire is a gigantic downfall.
We had the chance of a super-fast uncomplicated modern system and what are they doing. They are doing something you would find in North Korea.
Asia has the best and fastest broadband, and we get something that should have been left as is. The Abbott and Turnbull show.

Rudd/Gillard! What a legacy. Problem is that Turnbull is no better.