Yabby,
What's "immoral" about making a strategic decision for the future prosperity of the nation or would it be more moral to do nothing and just hope for the best?

Perhaps we should ask China or Singapore to come and build it for us instead.

Any alternate suggestions?

What's the difference between doing this with taxpayers money or using it to guarantee Bank deposits for example?

The Future Fund (which exists mainly to fund the future superannuation of politicians) has already bailed out of much of it's Telstra holdings.

I notice that the initial share price drop has recovered quite well in the meantime.

*The Future Fund (which exists mainly to fund the future superannuation of politicians) has already bailed out of much of it's Telstra holdings.*

The future fund also sits on 25 billion $ of cash, much of the
original money taken from investors, selling them the copper network
and its ducts. Forget the exchanges, that ducting has huge value
and is what Conroy is after, for he knows the cost of building
it from scratch. There is no reason that the future fund can't
buy back that copper network as an investment, with cash on hand.

*Any alternate suggestions?*

Lots of alternate suggestions. Telstra were quite prepared to build
a fibre network, they already have a large chunk wired up with fibre.
But they want to know that they will get a return on their future
investment, which is fair enough. Nobody is going to commit billions
of more $, if for ideological reasons, the Govt thinks that profits
should go to people who don't invest in infrasructure, like the
many fly by night resellers who want to make a quick quid from all
of this and drive us nuts with their marketing calls from India.

*What's the difference between doing this with taxpayers money or using it to guarantee Bank deposits for example?*

That is like comparing apples and cabbages, but that is another
story. The point is that if the Govt want to do this, then they
should not expropriate assets from people who bought them in good
faith, but pay market value for them, the same as it would do,
if it expropriated your house.

The copper network and its ducts have a value, the Govt sold it,
now it wants it back. It should pay for it. Why do you have a
problem with that?

One of the ironies of the government's coercion of Telstra is that it should make the cap and trade system more expensive. What a lot of the posts on this thread ignore is that if governments behave capriciously towards private investors it increases what they have to pay private investors in return for their investment to compensate for the risk.

If Rudd ever gets the ETS through it will confer rights on private investors which they will then trade. These rights are created out of thin air, but in other respects aren't that much different to the property rights conferred on the purchasers of shares in Telstra. Which means that, if a future government were to behave like this one, if the cost of the system becomes too politically onerous, they might just take the precedent and change the rules so as to damage the value of the rights.

That is likely to happen somewhere around 2020 when the whole system falls into a hole because of the failure of society to find and implement an alternative to a carbon-based energy system. Might even be earlier, but from memory that's when the real reductions are supposed to cut in.

Actually GrahamY these two subjects come together quite substantially.
The governments policy of increasing electricity costs depends on
the so called Intelligent Grid enabling price control and load shedding.
I am referring to the local grid not the national grid.
There have been a number of abortive attempts to use power line data
at 200mbit speeds to enable control of the grid, but with the NBN to
be at every premises in Australia that almost certainly will be done
via the internet fibre cable.

The electricity network will be one of the major users of the NBN and
or Telstra's node to the copper.
However the actual number of bytes transmitted will be quite small.