Plan dropped under cover

News has emerged that the Labor government quietly dismissed its plan for wireless inner-city broadband on the day of the Sydney Harbour boat crash. Eric Roozendal, the Minister for Commerce, announced that the plan would be shelved because it was not practical because of financial and technological concerns. The associated press release was not emailed to political journalists.
The question must be raised of why Roozendaal chose to make the announcement in the midst of the harbour tragedy.
A staffer of Mr Roozendaal said the announcement to scrap the plan was made on the day of the harbour crash because that is when the decision was taken. That is nonsense, pure and simple. Analysts said that the difficulty with building a wireless network in the city should have been obvious years ago, and the announcement to scrap the plan could have been made at any time.
This government has a history of dismissing projects when the media’s focus has turned elsewhere. It is indicative of a government that has no regard for releasing information in the public interest, but is more interested in managing its own image. By now, the public can see it as well.
A telecommunications market analyst at IDC Australia said the project sounded like “an election promise to get them over the line more than anything else” and that Labor would have known as early as the end of 2006 whether the project was viable.