The Prospect of Tony Abbot As Prime Minister

[tcpip]

Recent opinion polls show Tony Abbot has a better-than-even chance of becoming Prime Minister. This possible requires some serious thought. If you are gay, you can absolutely forget about same-sex marriage rights. At least with Labor, all that's required is to get the matter tabled at cabinet and the vote will be won. His absolutely archiac and offensive attitudes towards women, climate change and indigenous people is infuriating.

He carries a dangerous attitude towards to industrial relations and his deep indifference and ignorance of economic matters. Abbot loved 'Workchoices', and will bring it back; especially targetting unfair dismissal laws, pay and conditions, and penalty rates. Opposing the economic stimulus package, which is considered among the best designed in the world, with excellent results, Abbott not only expressed opposition to it, but slept through the vote after a night on the sauce.

Absolutely reckless cuts are planned against nation-building IT and environmental infrastructure, in favour of handing back $10.5 billion of resource rents from our commonwealth, to mining companies; because Tony understands that billionaires are having tough times. Abbott's accounting has been slippery or stupid. [T]he Coalition asked the department the cost of giving the Productivity Commission an extra $4 million a year. Yesterday the department replied poker-faced that it would cost $4 million a year.. One can only echo the words of Craig Emerson; Australia has never had in the post-war era a more economically incompetent candidate for the prime ministership than Tony Abbott.

Update: Former Reserve Bank chief, Bernie Fraser, (hardly a radical) blasts the Coalition over their economic policies.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

How can you define scrapping the ridiculous excess of the NBN as a reckless cut? $2000 per person for fast broadband, when what we have at present is quite adequate for most purposes, is inane waste.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

So you'd rather our internet infrastructure lagged even further behind the rest of the developed world than it already is?

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

What amazing hype. The availability of DSL2+ is way higher here than in, say, the USA.

Some countries with super-high population concentrations have better speeds than us, but that's inevitable.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"What we have at present" is insufficient for necessary infrastructure for the future, especially for connecting population nodes. Whilst I would prefer other infrastructure expenditure to have priority it is still a very good project.

Also this is a essentially a transfer payment; billions of dollars out of IT infrastructure, billions of dollars handed back to the mining companies.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Capital that would be recouped after... 2 years at present rates.

NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[arjen-lentz.livejournal.com]

This is about a road, an electronic one.
NBN costs about $10bln/year over 4 years investment to build. Considering it's nation wide, that'll be about the cheapest piece of infrastructure that's ever been built. It's an absolute bargain.
There are a few new tunnels and bridges in Brisbane that cost multiple billions each!

NBN is not primarily for the "lucky" people who live in the right suburbs of the major population centres, it's for everybody. It means people can live elsewhere and do high tech jobs, but it also means farmers are able to upload the videos of their cattle to sell. That's a real need now, a satellite downlink to the outback can't deliver that.

This e-road delivers something very very valuable, namely ability to make a living outside the major population centres - it affects lifestyle (for all of us), education, health, use of resources, and more.
Quite possibly the people who came up with it didn't even realise that ;-), but it's huge.

Then we can also look at other countries, many "3rd world" nations have faster, more reliable and cheaper Internet connectivity than we do. And I know, because I've had people in those countries as my colleagues and the connectivity/bandwidth is what enabled the jobs.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

You've outlined one of the worst aspects of it: Astronomical cost to cover the few percent of people who choose to live a long way from major cities.

One of the advantages to paying 5 times as much to live in an urban area than in the country is that services are much cheaper to provide. I've even thought about that choice myself. I could live in the country, where housing is (roughly) 1/5 the cost, and everything else (e.g. broadband) would be far more expensive. That's a choice people make.

Rolling out extremely expensive broadband to users in very low-density areas is, I believe, totally unjustified. If people want that lifestyle, it's up to them to pay for the costs, not to be subsidised by the rest of us.

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

Quite a static and shortsighted view,IMHO.
The societal and business trends I've seen are going to drive Internet usage sharply over the next few years. Not just in terms of data size, but in terms of throughput. Action now will allow Australia to ride that wave rather than languish in steadily increasing irrelevance.

I think the NBN shows forethought and planning for future infrastructure. Something I think is the governments primary responsibility and one that the previous government neglected willfully.

I for one an more than happy to pay to see Australia moving forward. If it means we outstrip the rest of the world, good for us!

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful statement of conservative ideals.

I'm sure there were people just like you 200 years ago saying 'Why should we fund this Blaxland, Wentworth, Lawson expedition when the space we have at present is quite adequate for most purposes?'

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Let's play spot the irrelevant, inaccurate, ad hominem attack.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

You haven't mentioned asylum seekers. That's just as abhorrent a policy.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

True that. Abbott's trite "Stop The Boats" claim is certainly deserving of criticism. He doesn't actually have a policy of "stopping" boats at their source, but he certainly agrees on punishing those who arrive here, by assigning them to detention in a country that is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees and re-introducing the highly damaging policy of Temporary Protection Visas.

[zey.livejournal.com]

I suspect he actually secretly wants boats to come partway, but, to be given the opportunity to "stop" them in a way that's visible to the xenophobe demographic.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh good article from The Punch ... quite a worthwhile online 'zine

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/abbotts-asylum-seeker-policy-is-out-of-its-mind/

[zhenzhi.livejournal.com]

i don't even want to imagine what it would be like with him running the show. :-(

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

But it is quite possible at this stage.

I can certainly understand people wanting to give Labor a bit of a kick, but you know, after getting rid of workchoices, ratifying Kyoto, making a formal apology to indigenous people and getting us through the GFC unscathed, it hasn't been a bad three years.

(Heck, even the insulation programme wasn't as bad a people make out...)

The possibility of a Howard Mark II looms on the horizon. And it's not a pretty sight..

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I am so angry that I can't vote any more. The thought of that man being PM makes me sick to my stomach.

[jennifergearing.livejournal.com]

That so many people seem to think he's a viable option terrifies me. I'd put it down to shit polling but I've spent too much time with some of my business clients of late, and too many of them feel comfortable enough to talk about how they think he's "a great bloke" with "a better plan" (what fucking plan? IDEK). Every time it happens my stomach drops and I feel a little less safe in this country I've lived in my whole life; and I never felt very safe to begin with.

Perhaps it was naive of me to think 2007 was a few steps forward, but I gotta say; if this election swings LibNats back into power, I don't know how we come back from that.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I agree with your sentiments; there is no greatness from this backward Howard-clone and there is certainly nothing of a plan that's beneficial to the majority of people.

The polling has been pretty crazy the past couple of weeks, but I get the feeling that things are changing. People are beginning to focus on the extremely poor economic competence of the opposition leader and his ultra-conservative views.

Being politically partisan I was worried that Nelson or Turnbull might steal the middle ground in an election. In this case I am worried about the thuggish legislation this crusader will impose on others.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

I'm an ABBA fan: Anyone But Bloody Abbott!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I can hear the guns, Fernando. He's sure not a dancing queen, down the aisle or anywhere else (there won't be any ring, ring). But he does want to cut my super, and call another war, trooper and give the mining companies all our money, money, money.

After going on and on and on, I'd still like to see him bang a boomerang.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I would've preferred an article in place of the thirty-second Youtube ad, to be frank. I think it short-changes the post.

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

Thts election is like life-saving surgery without anesthetic.
I want the pain to stop, but there's too much riding on it to just ignore:(

[zey.livejournal.com]

"[T]he Coalition asked the department the cost of giving the Productivity Commission an extra $4 million a year. Yesterday the department replied poker-faced that it would cost $4 million a year."

Ah, now that's not quite a fair thing to take the piss out of them for.

In most Coalition governments, it'd cost an extra $5M in consultant fees to buy the justifications for it.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]