Stephen Conroy, The Australian, theNBN, and let the war get bigger and bigger ...

It didn't take long for the lizard Oz to engage in a war with Stephen Conroy and take it up a notch. Conroy, if you remember, declared war on Lateline the other night, here, and the Oz doesn't believe in phoney wars or dropping leaflets, and so today it opened fire on all fronts, and sent the tanks racing around the Maginot line.

What am I saying? The Oz has been at war over the NBN long before jolly Joe Hockey decided it would be sound policy to do a Chifley and nationalise the banks.

If you looked at the other rags this morning, you'd see the push pull of warrior style reporting isn't in the kitchen, not when compared to the lizard Oz raging about the NBN.

The Daily Terror is on about how the dirty Dutch abandoned the doughty diggers, and how James Packer turned into an elephant in the room.

The Sydney Morning Herald heads its digital edition with John Howard doing John Costello over once again, in a pre-emptive strike designed to boost sales of his memoir, followed by a report on a Canadian colonel getting sent down for life, when life should surely mean life ...

You have to look down the page to Money to see where the Daily Terror picks up one of its stable mates stories, Only one in ten Aussies have taken up National Broadband Network, and the Herald's piece Minister threatens to use law to force people on NBN if states revolt has now slipped down into the technology pages.

It's The Australian that has embarked on what we might call a 'block booking' style that means the top of its digital page today provides a flurry of 'stories', which conflates news with campaigning, often accompanied by a pious denial of any devious intent.

This time it's up to Matthew Franklin to provide the denials, in Conroy spinning into old habits with rant.

It's fun to read a rant about a rant, as Franklin rants about the ranting Conroy by ranting about the various failures of the Labor government, and the lizard Oz's righteous denunciations of said failures. The thesis is that the NBN is just next step in an epic tale of pink batts and school halls piece of socialisation, quite unlike jolly Joe's attempt to do a Chifley, and only the righteous lizard Oz has told the full story.

You have to read down to the end to get to the nub of the NBN issue:

Conroy's other complaint concerns The Australian's reports in the lead-up to the election suggesting that once the NBN had been connected to people's homes, they would need to pay to connect it to the various computers in their home.

This newspaper consulted industry experts, leading to claims that it could cost some families as much as $3000 to exploit the NBN service to its full potential.

While government sources do not dispute that people might have to pay to connect the service to the various computers in their homes, they dispute the figure and resent that The Australian published a report about the potential costs just before the election.

Conroy should get over his hyper-sensitivity.

Should the Oz get over its hyper-sensitivity as well?

You see, when speaking of figures, The Oz isn't high on domestic fiscal literacy, and will seize on any cost to build, brick by brick, the notion that consumers will bleed to death by getting broadband.

In today's full bout of hand wringing about the costs, there's a story about how a battery will be needed. The battery's the size of a half brick that'll cost fifty bucks, moans Fran Foo in Hidden back-up charge for users in fast broadband service. And if you don't have the battery? You'll be dead in your bed and unable to call 000 on your phone.

Strangely Fran doesn't mention that you'll need to regularly replace the battery, or else an electrical fault might develop and your house will burn down. Or at least show significant signs of the corrosive effects of a run down battery.

And then there's the disturbing news from Stuart Kennedy that NBN wiring could cost users up to $400 a room.

Why allowing wiring for four bedrooms, and a couple of studies, and the lounge room and perhaps the living area - and certainly the kitchen, after all it's vital that the stove and the fridge be connected to broadband - before you know it, you're up to $3,000 a home in the blink of an eye.

Of course when you do this kind of domestic cost benefit analysis, you have to be cagey and careful in your phrasing. Here's how it's done:

Wiring up a house to make best use of the National Broadband Network could cost up to $400 a room.

Well played Mr. Kennedy. "Best use", "could cost", and then blame the costing on the experts, and never mind any conflation of the cost of building the NBN to the home and what you do within the home when connected - after all, Mexican expert Carlos Slim Helu indicated that it would cost well over $6,000 - more like $7,000 - to just get connected. Heck, that seems expensive (remember Slim? Here he is in the Oz whipping it along at the Forbes conference).

But we've moved on from the days when it was costing $6,000-$8,000 a connection, on a household basis, which saw big Mal Turnbull caught out in his calculations back in September on Lateline, here:

TONY JONES: Well, hang on a sec! Hold on, hold on, hold on. You've raised the question of the costs per household, Malcolm Turnbull. Now, I think you've written it'll be $4,000 per household. Tony Abbott say it'll be $5,000 per household. The visiting Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu say it'll be $7,000 per household. Who's right?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I mean, you can just work it out. You can divide through the number of households by 40 - divide the number of households into $43 billion and you get the answer.

TONY JONES: Well, no, you don't. We actually did that. Your figure, your $4,000 figure multiplied by 8.57 million households comes out at $34 billion, so I'm wondering how you came up with your figure to start with.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I'm not sure whether that - where that figure came from, but it's $43 billion over around - over around nine million households and businesses. So ...

STEPHEN CONROY: But that's a completely false representation. This is investing in an asset that will last up to 40 years. If you take even Malcolm's $4,000 and stretch that across 40 years, it's about 13 cents a day.

Now we've moved along, the FUD concerns the wiring within the home.

But hang on, surely I can use wireless, since the redoubtable Henry Ergas only yesterday explained in Shield protects NBN from competition that wireless was all the go:

... it gets worse.

For it has now been disclosed (not by NBN Co or the government, which are refusing to disclose information, but by Telstra) that the agreement also hobbles wireless competition, including by prohibiting Telstra from encouraging customers who might move to NBN Co to choose high-speed wireless services instead.

Outrageous. Well at least I can use wireless in my home and save all those extravagant costs involved in fibre optic cabling the joint.

Sorry, you must be dreaming:

While most people with broadband connections today use wireless routers to distribute bandwidth around the house, wireless won't handle jobs like streaming high-definition video, such as on the latest internet TV services, to multiple screens at once.

See! That Cat 5 cable you've got around the house is totally useless, and so is wireless, and so it's Cat 6 cable for you and squillions in fancy Sydney tradespeople trooping around the house.

Fancy that, and the Cat 5 which we have around the house, and which handles a 100bmb/s network is no longer good enough. Presumably because the cable cost about fifty bucks, and if you have a crimping tool and know what you're doing cost $0 in terms of labour (unless of course you're talking about the opportunity cost of not going fishing).

You know what that all this means! Peter Weir's telemovie The Plumber given a face lift and a storyline update, so that instead of the plumber molesting you, it's now an NBN techhead geeky nerdy technician ...

We're all doooomed.

Naturally The Australian managed to dig up an expert who announced - in best plumber style - that it would cost between $250 and $400 a port, and also dug up someone whom we can perhaps call an obsessive compulsive personality, who'd splattered 20 connection points around the home.

But hang on, hang on. The 20 points cost him $4,000. At $250-400 a port, according to the costings guru, it should have cost somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 a home.

$8,000 a home? Why that's way worse than $6,000. We're all doooomed ...

Never mind that consulting with this cheerful soul sounds like the average punter seeking out a hi fi buff for the best home cinema sound and screen going around, and wondering how he ended up dropping 20k (oops, sorry, it'll cost you that much for the two speakers we recommend, the Quad ESL. How about 40k?)

As for the obsessive and the NBN, struggling along on ADSL?

"If the NBN gets as far as we are, I will just gobble it up," he said.

Please, someone whack that man over the head with a sturdy stick. Totally off message and off song ...

We're in the business of feeding hysteria, not reading about you slobbering about the NBN.

Meanwhile, in a heart rending story of how things have gone wrong in Tasmania, the Oz gets down and dirty with the frustrated citizenry:

Pensioner Leon Bailey, who lives next to the Baineses, does not know how to use the internet or computers, preferring fishing. But he took up the free offer to connect his house to the NBN.

"I wouldn't know which button to press," Mr Bailey says.

"But I was going to be connected for nothing so I thought 'why not?' ."

He says that when his son Scott returns from working interstate in a year or two he may want to live with him for a while, and then the internet connection may be made active.

What's that anecdote mean? Who knows. Could it mean that the connection was free? Could it mean he might make the connection active at his leisure when it suits, and when way down the track the copper network meets its end? It all sounds strangely relaxed, just at the point that it seemed like the world was about to come to an end, the fault of the NBN.

Strangely, tt comes at the end of a complaint by a solid Tasmanian citizen that his connection to the NBN has yet to be activated.

What the hell's he complaining about? Doesn't he realise that once he's connected, it's going to cost him squillions to make effective use of it ...

Sheesh, the NBN folk are doing the right thing, not connecting him up and so driving him to bankruptcy, and all he can do is whinge about how he's not connected.

The upshot? By the end of a morning's reading of The Australian's 'reporting' on the NBN - which is to say, a conflation of opinions, prejudices, distortions and bizarre notions - it's possible to end up completely confused, and ...

... we've decided to take the day off and go fishing. It seems the only sensible way to solve the cost and productivity issues involved, absent a sensible domestic cost benefit analysis.

Which is another way of saying that the lizard Oz and the lizard-like Stephen Conroy deserve each other, and anyone who reads the rag for the next few months can expect a ceaseless tirade of 'reporting' about how the NBN is the worst exercise in communist green socialism ... since Joe Hockey channelled Ben Chifley ...

As for the actual matter of the NBN? Don't you worry about that. We understand that the choice of a lure is perhaps the most important consideration in fly fishing ... but it can be expensive ... up to $400 a fly, and you need a minimum of twenty of them if you're to properly enjoy the fishing experience.

A line, a worm and a hook? Filthy socialist communist pervert ... go nationalise a bank.

(Below: a Tasmanian displaying the patience of a saint on the front page of the Oz, waiting for the NBN to be connected, little realising that once connected, bankruptcy is only a matter of months away).