This database is mostly a catalogue of instruments that are blunt where they should be sharp. This is the counter-example, and it deserves to be recorded precisely because it is so rare.

Under the current round, funding share is set by how much sharing a project delivers:

• Up to 100 per cent where all three national mobile network operators use active sharing or roaming.
• 50 to 75 per cent for co-location, or where fewer than three operators participate.

Why this is good design. In a thin market, duplicated infrastructure is the classic waste: three towers where one would do, each serving a third of the population, none of them commercial. The obvious policy responses are to exhort carriers to co-operate, or to mandate it and litigate about the terms.

This does neither. It prices the externality. A carrier that shares gets a better subsidy; one that does not gets a worse one; and the decision is left to the carrier with the incentive pointing the right way. The Commonwealth ends up buying coverage for everybody's customers rather than for one company's.

Why it is in a reform database as enacted. Because the pattern is transferable and almost nowhere else in this database uses it. Most funding rules here are binary — you qualify or you do not — and produce the cliffs this project keeps recording: the 100 per cent bulk billing requirement, the 30 hour rule, the sharers rate. A graduated rate tied to a public benefit is the alternative shape, and it exists, and it works.

The same rounds also carry $22.5 million dedicated to First Nations telecommunications solutions, contributing toward Closing the Gap Target 17 — targeting by need within a competitive program rather than leaving it to the competition.

What to watch. Whether the highest-sharing configurations are actually being built, or whether the 100 per cent rate is theoretical because three-way active sharing is commercially or technically hard. That is the empirical question and this project does not have the answer.