Thank you. I understand that the buildings were listed under priority, future, and optional, three different categories in the RFP, and that all of the government offices were pretty well covered under the priority. This does leave very little room for any competition here. I guess my concern here is that, as I said yesterday, I think we have a real potential to grow here. I know that one of the bidders in this process was a consortium of six businesses in town, plus NT Net Society, which provided significant depth for the understanding of how networks work, of how the hardware should be put together and managed. I think it may have been unfortunate that adequate weight was not given to that in the evaluation of their proposals.

Under bullet two, about the exclusive contract here, it says it is unlikely, this is from the information, Mr. Chairman, that I was provided with by the Minister and that I tabled earlier today, it is unlikely that a business case could be made for use of an alternative fibre-optic service provider. This is then attributed to additional costs for connection to the government data centre, and the additional complexity for the management.

I just wonder why this would be seen as difficult when, for instance, this building we are in right now has had a fibre connection since it was built, put in by the private sector and that is still the connection that is used. There has to be a contract worked out to hook this building up, first of all to the data centre, and then from there to Hansard, for instance, which again is another privately supplied route. It is not one that is part of the NorthwesTel route.

How is it that this is a problem when we are already using the private sector for two of the sections in the city?