Outgoing Google chief executive Eric Schmidt lauded the Australian government's national broadband initiative of putting up a country-wide network that he said would boost business and consumer growth.

Speaking from the internet giant's Mountain View, California headquarters, Schmidt characterised the $43 billion NBN project as representative of Australia's excellent leadership, which in turn would encourage advancement and innovation.

The incoming Google chairman told Fairfax on Friday that "the decision to have universal fibre access is one of the most important decisions the Australian government has made."

Schmidt's endorsement of the NBN came as the billion-dollar project faces growing criticism from both inside and outside of Australia, with telecom mogul and currently the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, declaring last year that the federal project is bound to waste taxpayer's money.

Slim stressed that giant undertakings such as the NBN is best left to the private sector, resulting to better efficiency once the infrastructure has been laid out and more savings for the Australian government.

However, the Google head believes that it was only appropriate for governments to take up the initiative in building up their countries' infrastructures, such as the case of Australia, rather than wait for private businesses to do the job for them.

The decision to roll out NBN, according to Schmidt, highlighted "the excellent leadership of Australia so that other countries accelerate their deployments."

Schmidt added that "investing in the national broadband infrastructure at this level is probably the highest leverage investment that the country can make because it touches so man aspects of the society."

More so, the Google executive admitted that the fast internet access set to be delivered by NBN would redound to good business for Google as he jokingly said that "Australian citizens will be able to get information faster, and they will be able to watch even more YouTube movies and waste their time."

On a more serious note, he stressed that NBN's faster network would bring in more business for Google, adding that economic benefits would also be felt by other internet firms, which regard the Web as their theatre of operations.