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]

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

[[Citation Needed]]

Because some other people from U.S. disagree.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/treating-aussie-internet-users-like-a-bunch-of-dodos/

[loic.livejournal.com]

Anecdotally ADSL2+ is almost completely unavailable in the US. At least in the SF Bay Area. There's one or two small providers starting to roll it out. I just got cable broadband and that's getting me close to 20mbits though.

[discordia13.livejournal.com]

I'de just like to be able to get guaranteed ADSL of ANY type here in Perth.
The average (maximum) speed for suburbs around Hazelmere and South Guildford is 1Mb up 100k down. Most of South Guildford can get above that but is not on an ADSL2 enabled exchange.

90% of the phone lines in these areas are still on RIM technology with Telstra planning to upgrade their infrastructure *real soon*. It's been like this for 5 years.

It's taken my company - working together with AAPT, an average of 5-8 weeks to get new ADSL keyed lines installed in this area. Thats TWO MONTHS for a line that cannot do ADSL2 and can barely break the 1 meg barrier. And then AAPT charges $2000 a month for the managed VPN service on that 1M connection.

Where is Hazelmere you might ask? It's the suburb next to Perth Airport - barely 12km from the CBD in one of the fastest growing industrial estates in Western Australia.

Explain to me why the NBN is a bad thing for businesses and people again or how it's too expensive?

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

One idiot's ill-informed op-ed in Punch isn't worth citing.

In the US, the usual situation is that there is DSL provided by one's local phone company plus internet provided by one's cable TV company. The latter is often cheaper, but often forces users to have cable TV, even if they don't want it. The fibre options, such as Verizon's FIOS, are only available if you happen to live in an area serviced by their phone lines. There is, to my knowledge, no provision for other telcos to get access to one's local exchange. It's like Australia was pre-DSL2+, when Telstra controlled the exchanges and all DSL was just resold from Telstra.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

As an anonymous poster points out (below) that even the relative availability of xDSL2+ compared to the United States is not something to aspire to. The fact that we lag behind most of the developed world in terms of ICT infrastructure is an argument for the NBN, not against it.

[(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.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

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...

[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.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The question shouldn't be just be made on the sheer quantity of people but rather on the economic benefits that are brought by the network.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I quite agree. Most of what people use the internet for (web browsing, email, etc) is hardly impacted by greater speeds. The benefit is close to zero. I'm still on 1.5Mb/s ADSL. I tried 8Mb/s for a while, but the effective difference, unless you are downloading huge files, is negligible.

Like all computing power, people find ways to waste any resource you give them. No doubt Aussies will saturate the NBN with higher and higher definition torrents of their favourite TV shows and movies, but I'd rather prefer those who really care about such to pay for it themselves.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[arjen-lentz.livejournal.com]

I'm not opposed to having those who utilise/consume a resource paying for it. What you describe in terms of Internet use is mostly consumerism, a big down pipe shifting TV shows, movies and other crap into your house.
But the Internet is more than that, people are using it to interact (and this thread is a good example of that!) - while downstream capacity is relevant for some uses (useful ones rather than the ones you mentioned ;-) your upstream bandwidth is an important factor also.

Now, with regard to paying... having someone "out there" pay for their broadband ends up on your budget anyway, in the form of more expensive food since you just raised the cost of the producers. The end result is the same for you. The difference is that as a national infrastructure project, it becomes available to everybody.

Some things are considered so important that the government builds the infra: basic road access, sewerage and garbage collection/treatment/storage, drinkable water, education, healthcare, telephone network.
Some of those aspects are now in part or whole privatised, but would they have come about for the benefit of you and me now, if it had been left to those who needed it? I think not.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[arjen-lentz.livejournal.com]

Craig, the problem is closer then you think: your lifestyle choice for the city forces others to live out in the country. You want your fruit, veg and possibly meat. It has to be grown somewhere, and there's not enough space near where you live. So it's further away.

Now, you want to pay a reasonable price for things things, so these farmers need to work efficiently. For instance, need to upload a video of their cattle to sell it, rather than ship them all to a central location and then onward to the buyer (expensive in time, manpower and other resources, loss of cattle in-transit, etc)

Distributing people more allows food production to happen near or closer to population centres. That would need infrastructure too, broadband is a key aspect of it anyway, and I'll still contend with you that NBN is bloody cheap compared to pretty much any other capital infrastructure project.
Of course $40bln is a lot of money, but that really is not the point.

There's issues in rural Australia with health and education. Well, big growing cities have major problems with the same. Cities are not the solution, they are as much part of the same problem. We might as well build smart infrastructure so that location is no longer the problem. Then we have a more space to solve the real issues.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

That was a great comment.

[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.

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

No. Let's play, spot the clichéd reaction from a conservative faced with an approach that isn't on the crib sheet.

Irrelevant, How?

Innaccurate, How?

ad hominem...I'm not even going to bother because I know it's just a catch-all phrase to right-wingers whenenever they think someone has unfairly suggested that their argument is stupid.

For the record 'ad hominem' actually means 'to the man' and if you can point out how my comment was somehow attacking you as a person, rather than deriding your argument as short-sighted, banal and utterly without merit, I will stand corrected.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Irrelevant because expeditions 200 years ago into the unknown are irrelevant to known technology today. As is the level of expenditure. Pretty self-evident, really.

Inaccurate because I made nothing as broad as conservative ideals, which encompass way more than just not wanting to waste tens of billions.

"ad hominem" really needs to be explained to you? You appear to know what it means, so I can only assume that, like presenters on Fox News, you just hope your audience is on your side and don't actually think about what you are saying. How is "I'm sure there were people just like you" anything but "to the man"? You've certainly provided no comment about the subject matter itself. Likewise, "short-sighted", "banal" and "without merit" appear to just be examples of you flailing about with pejoratives. Ironically, they apply much more accurately to your response than they do to my comments.

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

I win.