From: axl867@huxley.anu.edu.au (Albert Langer)
Newsgroups: aus.aarnet,comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: Upgrading AARNet - PM's Announcement
Followup-To: aus.aarnet,comp.org.eff.talk
Date: 16 Dec 1992 10:51:39 GMT
Organization: Guide Mark IV - Pilot Study, Room 42
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12
Summary: "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."

In article <ggm.724389596@brolga> ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au 
(George Michaelson) writes:

>Ok Albert, I wuz wrong. Completely. The money is there. 

Me too, though not "completely". I *really* thought they would not
attempt to fly on arriving at the latest chasm and would realize that
they can't rush things through before the elections and would have to
setup the working party that was promised to develop a proposal.

Fortunately I qualified that by not staking my licence to prophesy
on it, in view of the impossibility of predicting what irrational
people will do when meeting behind closed doors.

Must admit though it never even *occurred* to me that they would
manage to implicate the Prime Minister as well as completely discrediting
the CRC Committee :-)
 
>Did the good guys or the bad guys win?

Most of the good guys have been busy making sandwiches up till now.

Any good guys would present proposals for R&D to upgrade AARNet for
discussion around the net rather than grabbing secretly for a "slice
of the action". So no good guys have either won or lost anything so far.

Some bad guys are now soaring across a wide chasm in much the same way
that steamrollers don't.
  
Things will get VERY interesting. It's ALREADY falling apart even
quicker than I would have hoped, judging from the news item Peter Elford
quoted. Don't imagine for one moment that an official announcement by 
the Prime Minister is any more reliable than the previous pronouncements
from "Rumour". The show is just beginning. 

I now believe the bad guys will lose even more heavily than I previously 
expected.

Seems the Vice Chancellors have now been humiliated along with the 
most of the eminent and distinguished lemmings who applied to be part of a 
"disaggregated centre" and the larger numbers of less distinguished
lemmings who asked Telecom to fund their "broadband" research projects
and got swatted.

So who's left to *defend* the ripoff? The erstwhile partners are
engaging in almost textbook tactics for building the broadest possible
united front against themselves.

Not only Professor Slatyer, but also the Cooperative Research Centres
Committee itself, now stands fully exposed as having endorsed a "centre"
with no research focus whatever, and not enough cooperation to even agree
on a single "contact" or on how to carve up the proceeds of the ripoff.

This was done with the following spectacular timetable:

 7 December - interviews of shortlist
 8 December - Science and Engineering Panel meeting
10 December - CRC Committee meeting
14 December - Prime Minister's announcement

The carve up is currently:

$4.6M for for Telecom broadband projects ($1.6M R&D, $3.0M for permission
to beta test an experimental network for them).

$3.4M to subsidize the AVCC's current operations (Telecom offered more
like $5M and the AVCC were outraged so they aren't going to cop that)

$3.0M for Zorba's supercomputer projects

$2.0M for Resource Discovery (could actually be relevant to upgrading
AARNet if they bothered to do a requirements analysis etc)

Best of all is the $3M to Zorba's projects, the description of which
was clearly produced by a random buzzword generator:

 "systems architecture, tools and techniques for interactive multimedia 
  access and navigation". 

This makes Vogon poetry look sublime!

Up to now Professor Ian Ross has kept well in the background and could have 
been a real problem. Now the spotlight will be well and truly on the Chair 
of the Science and Engineering Panel. (Zorba has already fled the country :-)

The main thing I can't figure out is Paul Keating. The whole point of rushing
things through in such a blatantly corrupt manner was to "secure" the funds
before the elections are called.

Professor Slatyer and the CRC Committee merely needed to completely abandon 
common sense in order to continue pursuing that course after it had been
leaked to the newspapers. But I don't see how the Prime Minister can keep
functioning while consciously adopting that "loser" perspective.

On the other hand I can't see Ross Free, the Minister assisting the PM, being 
unaware of what's going on, or being willing to risk misleading the PM.

Professor Slatyer was one of Bob Hawke's courtiers, not one of Keating's.
Is entangling the PM some kind of revenge?

Anybody got a theory?

Main point is the opportunity is now WIDE open to get organized to make 
AARNet easier to use and more widely available by pushing aside the 
discredited obstacles to that. Start moving...

More later.

-- 
Albert.Langer@anu.edu.au, Room 42, Red Cedars Motel, Watson ACT 2602, AUSTRALIA
Voice: +61 6 241 3222,  Fax: +61 6 241 2355, Telex: 62542 N-ISDN:? B-ISDN:????? 
Disclaimers: Nobody speaks for me, and vice versa. Totally unauthorised. 
RDN-CRC Narrow Bandwidth WG official statements: Try Roger_Clarke@anu.edu.au