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

[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?

[loic.livejournal.com]

No such thing as guaranteed ADSL.

I don't think that the NBN is a bad idea, I just don't think that Australia is as bad off for last-mile broadband as people can sometimes make out.

[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.