[LINK] Tasmanians to be forced to connect to NBN under new laws

[Paul Brooks]

  On 8/10/2010 9:14 PM, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 01:13 PM 8/10/2010, Paul Brooks wrote:
>>   and they may well be able to walk on the land,
>> but I'm pretty sure they don't have any rights to actually drill
>> holes in your wall
>> and attach things to your building without explicit permission.
> They must do. SP Ausnet just yanked out my old meter, attached a new
> 'smart' meter, and attached an antenna, no permission requested. I
> was told this was going to happen,  power going off for a few
> minutes, tough if I didn't like it.
Do you have an electricity supply contract? You would have given them permission to 
modify the equipment used to deliver the service as part of signing up - and the meter 
is their property after all.

If you did not have a mains power supply contract, no pre-existing meter, no 
meter-box, no existing power cabling from the street (perhaps you are self-sufficient 
with solar and one of these <http://www.cfcl.com.au/BlueGen/>), and they turned up out 
of the blue one day to bolt one on 'just in case you ever wanted mains power', they 
would be trespassing.

(The scenario actually works better with gas, but anyhoo... )

Paul.