The "Tragedy of Australia's NBN" has its genesis back in the years leading up to the sale of the, then, national telecommunications company Telstra. Policies both internally to Telstra and externally by both sides of politics ensured that any future improvements in the national telecommunications infrastructure would be a massive national failure.<p>The way the respective governments privitised the company ensured that the worst outcome would ensue. The current NBN is a mess that continues in the footsteps of those previous years.Irrespective of which government is in power, the implementation was doomed from the beginning.<p>If other paths had been taken 25 or 30 years ago (in some cases even longer), we would have a telecommunications infrastructure second to none in the world. But this is Australia, as a nation we are lacking in all the finer points that would enable us to achieve second to none status.