The ALP’s historical penchant for the democratic socialisation of industry has occasionally taken a back seat to market realities. But the ALP’s recent infrastructure announcements are the tip of an uncosted iceberg that culminates in the Rewiring the Nation program.

Labor’s 2021 National Platform suggests that infrastructure policy is too important to be ‘decided by politics and vested interests’. It goes on to suggest that Labor created Infrastructure Australia ‘to take the politics out of infrastructure planning’. With Victoria flagged to receive some $2.2 billion to fund the controversial Suburban Rail Loop, Labor seems to have forgotten their platform from 2021.

Not one of Infrastructure Australia’s priority list of ‘Investment Ready Proposal[s] (Stage 3), Near term (0-5 years)’ projects is in Victoria. The Suburban Rail Loop project is only at the ‘Early Proposal Stage’ according to Infrastructure Australia, but the federal government has prioritised this project for funding over other projects listed as ready to go by the very institution Labor created to keep the politics out of important infrastructure planning.

While Labor pundits see the proposed NACC as a way for unelected bureaucrats to curb political ‘corruption’ (very loosely defined), it is interesting that those same pundits consider ‘behaviour that’s not criminal can still constitute misconduct or corruption’ in relation to ‘sports rorts and car park rorts’. On that basis, corruption seems to be relevant to scale.

According to Labor pundits, if duly elected politicians commit to funding local initiatives these are rorts. If the federal government ignores the advice of the institution it created to take the politics out of infrastructure and commits billions of dollars to non-priority projects during a financial crisis (to a state government of their own party), this is just fine. Or hypocritical.

Speaking of cutting ‘waste’ in the budget, consider unnecessary funding for an assistant minister for the republic that nobody cares about. When food (in some cases) costs up to twice as much as it did before the election, and interest rates, fuel, and electricity costs are bleeding hundreds of dollars out of the average family’s weekly budget, a republic is the last thing on citizens’ minds. If Labor wants to cut the so-called waste in the budget, then getting rid of this assistant ministry is a great start.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Labor’s Net Zero policy is setting us up for an infrastructure nightmare just like the NBN. It was the Abbott Coalition government that produced the first publicly-available cost-benefit analysis of the NBN years after Labor reversed market reform in telecommunications.

Rewiring the Nation, tipped to cost $20 billion to achieve some 82 per cent renewables in the electricity generation mix, is likely to be funded by a model that replicates the ideological intent of the NBN. It is effectively the socialisation of infrastructure by stealth. It also has long-term implications for the competitiveness of the Australian energy sector in the same way the NBN stifled healthy competition in fixed-line services. Telstra’s 5G network rollout was not affected by the NBN’s anti-competitive measures because Labor picked fibre to the home as the technology ‘winner’. Labor lost.

Let me be clear at the outset, my research focuses on the aspects of the political economy that help or hinder access to networked technologies such as transport, telecommunications, and energy. I accept at face value that governments pursue policy outcomes in line with international trends deemed to be desirable. I do not focus on the normative aspects of Net Zero or whether or not we should be pursuing it. I’ve spent enough time in Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing to know that smog is an inevitable consequence of business as usual.

But Labor’s Net Zero plan reifies green and future technologies while preventing obvious solutions such as nuclear energy. For example, there is some debate that there is less need for Rewiring the Nation if coal and gas generators are replaced in situ by nuclear rather than connecting technologies that so far are not sufficiently dispatchable to meet our current let alone future electricity needs.

Rewiring the Nation is the weakest link in Labor’s plan to achieve ‘Net Zero’. Never mind that a senior Labor minister cannot explain ‘Net Zero’ nor point to existing technologies that can provide dispatchable electricity without coal or gas. Rewiring the Nation is going to be Labor’s next dud a la NBN. It is the weakest link in a complex yet so far unclear plan to implement Net Zero.

What is net zero? Conveniently, you can now find the officially-endorsed definition from the UN which is plain enough:

…cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any remaining emissions re-absorbed from the atmosphere, by oceans and forests for instance…

Nuclear energy aside, Labor’s version of Net Zero complicates matters in that it is not just about achieving Net Zero but achieving Net Zero in a certain way where the Labor government determines the technologies that will be adopted. I have argued elsewhere that technological neutrality is key to achieving energy security in Australia.

But there is no cost-benefit analysis for Rewiring the Nation and the experience of the NBN suggests there won’t be one.

Enter Labor’s tired old socialisation model for deploying networked infrastructure. Labor tried to pick a winner with the favoured technology for their NBN. A decade later I have high-speed broadband in Gunning NSW, not via the NBN, but through an entrepreneurial small businessman who uses a microwave link to deliver me an NBN-beating service. Billions of dollars of government meddling and one entrepreneur solved my problem using a technology that Paul Keating refused to back in the 1990s. Herein is the reason Labor’s approach won’t work.

Ten years ago, my research into Australia’s telecommunications sector revealed a legacy of political interference that disappeared briefly during the economic reforms of the 1990s, only to be reinstated by Kevin ’07 as the biggest nation-building project in Australian history.

Writing in The Conversation back in 2014, I warned that:

Politicking is the stuff of democracy. But when services that can be delivered by the market are caught up in politicking, the system falters.

Despite Australia lagging Canada in broadband take-up before the NBN, billions of dollars in public monies later has barely shifted Australia’s performance against Canada’s in the OECD per capita take-up statistics. And that is in a sector where section 51 (v) of the Constitution gives the federal government full authority for the industry. Constitutionally, electricity is a residual power that falls to the states, which in turn adds another level of complexity to the politicking. Just ask Victoria.

Labor created Infrastructure Australia to remove the politics from infrastructure provision. And now Labor has ignored the institution it created to flag billions of dollars for dubious infrastructure projects that are not considered priorities.

Labor should have learnt from the Khemlani affair and the NBN. At least a cost-benefit analysis would be better than back-of-the-envelope planning in the digital era. But old habits die hard it seems.