The Prime Minister urgently needs a better line about the NBN. Malcolm Turnbull’s response to every question about the NBN since the 2013 election has been to blame Labor for spending too much on fibre-to-the-premises technology, overseeing a slow rollout and treating the NBN as an asset, thus keeping it in the capital account of the budget and out of the budget deficit. But that’s been going on for four years now, and — for reasons both within his control and beyond it — voters associate the growing debacle around the network entirely with him.

Now the NBN experience of huge numbers of customers is proving underwhelming. In particular, customers blame the NBN for slow speeds. NBN blames internet service providers for not purchasing sufficient capacity. ISPs blame NBN for charging too much for capacity. NBN blames its high prices on the need to earn a return on the government’s investment. The PM blames that on Kevin Rudd, saying NBN should never have been expected to make a return (Rudd blames News Corp, a longstanding and nonsensical myth). Indeed, Turnbull’s been saying for some months that NBN wasn’t going to turn a handsome profit — in April he said that NBN was making a return but it wasn’t “what a commercial employer would want or a bank would want.”

Treating infrastructure investments on its books as an asset for which users need to be charged full price is a sensitive issue — that’s how the government is keeping its $9 billion inland rail boondoggle off the books. And formally, the government remains committed (as Labor was) to eventually selling the NBN. But to give credit where it’s due, the Coalition has always quibbled and cavilled about NBN being off the books — even if their motivation was more about running a debt’n’deficits scare campaign.

But blaming Labor won’t cut it politically for Turnbull. He’s Mr Tech, the man who, according to Tony Abbott, “virtually invented the internet in this country”, and the man charged with “demolishing” Labor over the NBN by Abbott, which is now mistakenly remembered as a task to demolish the NBN itself. But he’s the one who turned it into a half-copper network. In the electorate’s view, he broke it, so he owns it.

For Turnbull the broader problem is that Telstra didn’t do the project in the first place. As he said yesterday:

“Setting up a new government company to do it was a big mistake. If you want to look at a country that did this exercise much better, it’s New Zealand, and what they did there was they basically ensured the incumbent telco, the Telstra equivalent, split its network operations away from retail operations and then that network company … became, in effect, the NBN. The virtue of that was you had a business that knew what it was doing, that was up and running, that had 100 years of experience getting on with the job and the Kiwis have done this at much less cost.”

There are a couple of historical problems with that. One is that Labor tried to get Telstra, along with other telcos, to build a FTTP network in 2008, and Telstra declined to participate, deliberately submitting a non-compliant bid as part of the government’s tender process. The other is that, as part of Nick Minchin’s toxic legacy in telecommunications, the Coalition remained hostile to structural separation of Telstra for years after it went into opposition. Turnbull had to drag his own party kicking and screaming to support structural separation when Labor proposed it.

The second point is of more than historical interest. One of the consequences of neoliberal policies — in particular, the process of outsourcing, corporatisation and privatisation of many government functions — has been a form of learned helplessness of governments: the capacity, knowledge and expertise to get things done in the real world — like build a communications network — now rests in entities that were once under the direct control of the government but which are now in the private sector, driven by market imperatives. Telstra, once the PMG, then Telecom, is now a dominant private telecommunications incumbent. And in order to maximise the value of its privatisation, the government sold it as a vertically integrated entity, which undermined telecommunications competition from day one — a key reason why it would have been immensely risky to allow it to build a broadband network.

That was also a key reason why other private sector telcos in 2008 demanded a regulated monopoly for the original fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) project that Labor proposed — they knew they would need protection from Telstra, which could undermine the whole project by threatening to build its own network, just like it had crushed Optus’ hybrid fibre-coaxial cable rollout. It amounted to a neoliberal trap: the only body that could have cheaply built a broadband network was the one body that shouldn’t have been allowed to build it because it had been privatised.

Thus the government had to not merely build a new telco from the ground up to construct the NBN, but purchase access to Telstra’s infrastructure, which used to be owned by taxpayers but which is now operated for the benefit of shareholders. As Turnbull correctly says, we started from the wrong place. But at the time, all the other points of origin were even worse.

The lesson the Right draws from all this is that governments should never intervene, should never engage in large-scale projects, but just leave it all to the market — overlooking that it is neoliberalism that has cruelled the capacity of governments to intervene effectively and efficiently. So in that sense, whether it’s all his fault or not, it’s apt that Malcolm Turnbull is the one that is wearing the blame for the NBN debacle — a conservative leader hoisted by his own neoliberal petard.