Perhaps this link is a little delayed, but Adrian Smith of the National Library made a worthy comment on the NZNOG which needs attention:

The recently released Government Digital Strategy (http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz/) encourages co-operation and collaboration in as many ways possible between all New Zealand people, and organisations both Government and private sector.
When the many technical people on this NZNOG list receive this email, please take it to your leaders and explain the many benefits of Internet Peering at Neutral Internet Peering Exchanges to create a fully meshed, distributed Internet for New Zealand.
Digital Strategy Launch (http://www.r2.co.nz/20050516/) recording from Parliament.
When the big one hits New Zealand and we have a full-scale major civil defence emergency it will be far too late for the very capable technical people in each of the organisations to implement Internet peering. They will not be able to use the phone networks due to outages and overloading, and the current New Zealand Internet will fail because peering was not put in place and working.
It is in the interest of every single New Zealander that every New Zealand Telco, ISP and organisation connects their networks to the nearest Neutral Internet Peering Exchange and starts peering; and helps to create a real New Zealand Internet.
The original Internet was designed for this very reason for the US Defence Department to prevent a total failure of communications during major infrastructure outages and emergencies.
There would also be benefits for the Telco's and ISP's if this peering was already in place before the Telecom outage on Monday. It may have been a non-event, when both fibres were cut, the Telecom network could have re-routed traffic around the damage over TelstraClear's equally capable backbone network.
Even if Telecom had to pay TelstraClear for the temporary transit traffic, it would have probably been a far less cost to pay both financially and politically. And the major disruptions caused to a lot of people waiting at airports, unable to use EFTPOS networks etc. may have been avoided, and Telecom customers would still have trust in them to provide Internetworking services.
This would also work in reverse should such an event hit TelstraClear's network.
So come on New Zealanders, please get the important message and do something about this situation today.
Without realising it, you may save lives in the future because the NZ Internet does not break, just because a couple of fibre optic cables get cut by accident or equally by a natural disaster event.

So what does it take to separate the short-sighted policies of the cost accounting and marketing departments of foreign owned companies, from the technical requirements of a national network system?