[LINK] NBN fault maintenance

[David]

On Thursday, 5 December 2019 8:03:39 PM AEDT Dr.bob Jansen wrote:
> This is interesting. This is equivalent to being taxed for going off grid or buying bottled water instead of connecting to the water mains.

Yes, but the grid and the water supply are necessary pieces of infrastructure which have to be funded by the whole society, and we're all part of that society.  Everyone pays for lots of things they don't actually use personally.  If the argument is taken to its logical conclusion there would be no "Common Wealth" at all.

In any case I think it's true that parties for whom an electric power supply isn't available don't pay any overhead charges anyway.  The term "off the grid" used to mean that no power supply was available, not that it was available but someone declined to use it.

Having said that, I'm sure Councils et al levy lots of charges which are hard to justify.  Paul Keating advised never getting between a Premier and a bucket of money, and that goes right through the system.  High time-based charging for "STD" calls was still the norm when peak-hour trunk capacity between Sydney & Melbourne was less than 20% utilised, and that only changed when end-user VoIP arrived.  Governments were lobbied for years to allow time-based local call charging, and I suspect only their survival instinct ensured it never happened.  

David L.