The Prospect of Tony Abbot As Prime Minister

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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

[(Anonymous)]

The US is positively third world in much of their infrastructure. And using that phrase in connection with the US is beginning to be an affront to rapidly industrialising countries everywhere (see the I-35W bridge collapse as just one example, versus a visit to Shanghai or 30-40 other major Chinese cities).

Australia *is* extremely densely populated compared with many countries, if you look at overall population ratio for urban areas: the rate of urbanisation is extremely high, with concommittant lower costs for deployments there than in places like France, the USA or Brazil. Most of the NBN costs are being sunk in urban areas because of a terrific failure of the major access incumbent to modernise or do anything more than sweat the copper infrastructure as a semi-monopolist.

Urban Australia is pretty shocking for broadband compared with urban Sweden - costs are very high, bandwidth limited, diversity of access technologies, number of providers etc. Even France has significantly better price/performance (although that's just because of Iliad/Free, who've managed a remarkably effective disruption to the former-state provider oligopoly there).

My neighbourhood cableco here in NL offered 100Mbps more than 2 years ago. Gigabit fibre is available as a matter of course in new neighbourhoods and office parks. Much of rich Europe, Brazil, China and even India are starting getting similar deals.

Lead times for this kind of stuff is 10+ years - the technologies aren't really well developed when the rollout planning, and that's mainly financial engineering.

Australia == market failure in telecomms.

Either fix the mess that is Telstra (like the UK just did with BT, a functional breakup with the network operator spun out of the rest of the business) or do an NBN. The status quo isn't going to cut it in 15 years: Australians aren't quite so good at pulling a solution out of their arses when needed as the Americans are, so waiting for the cavalry is no option.

The NBN is fairly cheap compared to the costs of doing nothing: "fairly adequate" today just won't cut it later. Of course, a better original privatisation of Telstra (functional separation or competing infra providers/maintainers) or more aggressive regulation of it would have been even cheaper, and led to a more entrepreneurial culture in this market segment which is probably its own reward.

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OK, I didn't know that about the U.S. In a sense it doesn't surprise me, given the political disdain for public expenditure (except for war, of course). This is certainly not an situation to aspire to and your comments on Sweden are illustrative.

Of course, a better original privatisation of Telstra (functional separation or competing infra providers/maintainers)

True fact that! I put that in my submission to the Australian government in 1998 when I was contracting for Telstra when they moved to privitisation (which was called, the 'public ownership' bill because 'the public' could buy shares!).

Despite the seriousness of this change there was only 27 submissions, mainly by peak telecommunication organisations...