OK I can’t let this one go. I have been alerted to an interesting front page story in The Australian today. Here is the said front page and here is the story. Now I’ve been called many things in my time (“Internet monkey” still being my favourite) but “Kevin Rudd’s guru” was really out of the blue. I mean, really? Along with a mere 1,000 others I attended the 2020 summit over three years ago — which I was happy to do. But let’s face it, that is no real association with the Government. To be sure, I have supported the general idea of the NBN — especially as a means of breaking up the problems of competition in telecommunications. But unless I have missed it, I have never advised anyone in the current or previous Government’s on broadband. But, seriously, the “guru” tag really doesn’t apply.

That said, if it will give some publicity to the cause of getting competition back into the broadband debate, please call me what you want. But on that score, I thought that Business Spectator‘s treatment of my submission with Jerry Hausman did a great job in summarising the economic issues at the heart of it all.

In any case, all this comes on a day that Andrew Leigh quoted me in Parliament in a thoughtful speech on climate change. According to our media slant methodology, that means that The Australian moved one datapoint to the left.