Steve, Thanks for your note - yes Jeff Burgan got back to me with more information relating to the timing of a shift to a full CIDR based advertisement for Australian nets

NASA may have reasons for doing it this way. In general, we encourage everyone to register any more-specific component pieces not needed in the NSFNET/ANSnet configuration files in the Merit RRDB rather than in the PRDB. We have a "no configure" option flag in the PRDB to prevent a more specific route from being configured if people tell us, but bypassing the PRDB for direct RRDB registration is now the preferable option in such "no configure" cases.

thanks, Geoff