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]

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.