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tcpipRecent 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.
Update: Former Reserve Bank chief, Bernie Fraser, (hardly a radical) blasts the Coalition over their economic policies.
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.
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Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-07 09:01 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2010-08-08 03:03 am (UTC)Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-08 04:17 am (UTC)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
Date: 2010-08-08 07:00 am (UTC)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
Date: 2010-08-08 07:36 am (UTC)Not only is $40B a great deal of money, I don't trust the NBN any more than Telstra. We consistently see better prices than Telstra and better customer service than Telstra from every other ISP. Do we expect the NBN setup to be cost-effective? Or a white elephant like internet over cable TV? If the prices to customers are as they appear so far, few who have access will buy it anyhow.
Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-09 12:10 am (UTC)NBN is a layer 2 network, it's literally merely a road (for bits).
If, long ago, Telstra had been split in to infra and retail, there would have been less of a problem - but serious chunks of NBN infra would still be required as they're just not taken care of right now, not by Telstra either.
This thread, indeed, could've been conducted over a modem connection. I did stuff like that 25 years ago (no not exaggerating). However, *finding* this thread would have been another matter, as would be exchanging anything other than a few lines of text. Modems will not do now.
Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-10 01:49 am (UTC)http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/10/2978634.htm
Coalition plans
Date: 2010-08-10 07:00 am (UTC)- it needs to be reasonable high speed now, and able to grow further
- decent upstream bandwidth.
- standard wireless trickery does not satisfy these needs
- satellite is useless as it's a) high latency b) no upstream.
- available to everybody. And I do mean everybody not some funky % that excludes people outside major population centres. in AU.
This is vital for our future as a country: business, education, health.
It also affects what kind of business are possible (how green they can be) and where they can be located, as well as whom they can employ. It's critical.
Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-08 06:52 am (UTC)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
Date: 2010-08-08 03:07 pm (UTC)