Former National Broadband Network chief executive Mike Quigley has warned his successor not to “rewrite history” in its review of the fibre optic rollout.
“Don’t waste your time being party to a rewriting of the FTTP [fibre-to-the-premises] business case using nonsensical assumptions being made to prove a predetermined outcome,” Quigley says.
“You can run the risk of building more than Australians want or need in the future, or less than they want or need in the future.
“That latter risk exists because an FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) network cannot be easily upgraded to FTTP in an NBN environment.”
NAB chief economist Alan Oster has rejected claims scrapping the GST-free threshold would lead to an $800 million windfall, saying it would only raise $360 million at best.
“If you lowered the threshold from $1000 to $500, you would raise $40 million [in GST revenue]; if you lowered it to $100, you would raise $210 million; if you lowered it to $25, you would raise $310 million. And if you got rid of it completely, you would get about $360 million.
“This is not a survey, it is hard data based on 2 million [NAB] transactions per day.
“We don’t know how they would do it, but basically in a lot of ways it’s not a lot of money because the [average online] price is not high and to get a large amount of money you need to go right to the bottom because you have a large growing sector like iTunes and the average price there is $9.”
Coca-Cola Amatil has named former GrainCorp boss Alison Watkins as its new chief executive.
Watkins will leave GrainCorp in January and take over from current chief executive Terry Davis.
Watkins will become the female chief executive for an Australian top 30 company following Westpac chief Gail Kelly.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down to 5237.5. The Aussie dollar is down to US91.02 cents.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
