NBN Board sacked

Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications, has sacked the entire NBN board, except for Brad Orgill.  He was particularly critical of chairwoman Siobhan McKenna who was ultimately responsible for the constant delays, massive blowouts and contractors loss of income.   He described her as having no experience in the telecoms sector and wondered why her background as a management consultant qualified her for the position of chairwoman.   "It is remarkable that there is nobody on that board who has either run or built or been responsible for building or managing a large telecommunications network" he said.

Ziggy Switkowski

Ziggy Switkowski is the former Chief Executive Officer of Telstra and is tipped to head the new board.  Born in Germany, he went to the University of Melbourne, earning a Bachelor of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy in Nuclear Science at age 24 and went on to complete six years of postdoctoral research.  In 1993 he graduated from the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

He's been selected to perform a miracle - to swap Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy's FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) model for the cheaper alternative of  FTTN (fibre-to-the-node).  He has to renegotiable with Telstra to arrange copper access and compensation and completely re-design the rollout.  Telstar has built a test site in a laboratory to test the Government's alternative option and a trial began just after the election.

A petition by Nick Paine, calling on the government to endorse the FTTP was submitted to Mr Turnbull, but he said the electorate gave his government an overwhelming mandate to go ahead with their election promises, one of which was to scrap the NBN.

Labor's Anthony Albanese said yesterday "...And so the trashing of the NBN has begun."

History will judge which model was the best.