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Because without some rudimentary numbers like the ones he's talking about, everyone involved can escape accountability -- the politicians, the contractors, the
by davidp 13y ago
Because without some rudimentary numbers like the ones he's talking about, everyone involved can escape accountability -- the politicians, the contractors, the public (since they can claim to have been "misled" and not feel guilty later), ... But mainly because it's an invitation to corruption, for people known to be highly corruptible.
You're right that cost/benefit analysis is hard for transformative things like this, but the citizens throwing their hands up and saying "I don't care WHAT it costs" is like Pavlov's bell to politicians.
- jacques_chester 13y agoIf in the first place Labor had said "20 years, 100 billion", I for one would have found that plausible and -- yes! -- affordable. When they promised it for 40 billion in 3 years ... well. No. That was never going to happen. Imagine how many streets there are in your suburb. How many suburbs are there in your city? How many in the country? Somehow in just 750 working days they were going to source thousands of contractors, open hundreds of thousands of pits or dig thousands of new ditches, feed millions of kilometres of new cable, wire in millions of homes, install tens of thousands of new racks in exchanges without expanding the exchanges ... and somehow nothing would go wrong and nobody would fuck up and there'd be no asbestos or blocked tubes or inaccurate records or particularly tough ground or shonky contractors or labour shortages or bad weather or delayed deliveries. 3 years. This is what makes me mad. We were promised an amazing thing and so many of my friends and colleagues took absolute leave of their senses over it. It's embarrassing. We bitch about salesmen promising impossible bullshit to close a sale ... and then we bought impossible bullshit hook, line and sinker.