[LINK] Malcolm Turnbull on ABC Melbourne

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of David Boxall
> Sent: Monday, 11 April 2011 3:55 PM
> To: link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Malcolm Turnbull on ABC Melbourne
> 
> 
> On 8/04/2011 10:00 AM, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> > I caught some of this interview and thought I'd document 
> for Link ...
> > fast broadband by not running fibre to every house
> > expensive
> > wants as least cost to taxpayer
> > ...
> I find that last bit intriguing. I wonder what he meant by 
> "least cost".
> 
> Least cost for the foreseeable future would see us running 
> underground 
> fibre to every possible premises. Least cost for the current 
> electoral 
> cycle would have the government sitting on their hands and leaving 
> service provision to "the market".
> 
> It can't be credibly argued that we won't soon find that we 
> need fibre 
> to the premises. Doing a half-baked job might save a little 
> in the short 
> term, but will cost a lot later on when we have to go back 
> and do it right.
> 
> The government wants to string fibre overhead. That will need 
> replacing 
> within a decade. The opposition wants wireless instead of fibre. That 
> will need replacing before installation is completed.
> 
> In Australian politics it seems, there's never enough money to do it 
> right but there's always money to do it again. Unfortunately, 
> it's our 
> money.

Except, this time, the voters have e-smarts.

Of course, Malcolm is probably depending on the Bondi under thirties set
to be correct about being untethered... In which case, our NBN and the
Labor party have a problem.
The next crop of voters grew up on dying Tamagotchi pets. In other
words, this crop of voters knows that Technology can die if you don't
feed it, play with it or spend time with it. 

Time like the 47 minutes a day the ladies of Australia were spending on
Farmville, so the virtual stakes and value of the technology have been
raised, considerably.

If only our politicians could understand that the baby bonus has ensured
(in Australia at least) that the average "Farmville" player, (was)
female, 27 and at home with pre-schoolers...

Of course the worse thing in the world (before everyone left Farmville
for the other games) was the slow response of the Ajax based servers
(CDN) located in the USA constrained through a bottleneck about the size
of your average internet filter.

That problem was alleviated somewhat by the timely deployment of PPC-1 -
However as Australia's housewives will tell you, the main reason for the
GFC (global financial crisis in 2009) was that the redraw time for
Farmville was so slow that none of the ladies had any time left in their
day to go and do the household shopping.

If it hadn't been for Kevin telling us not to panic buy groceries in
April 2009, Australia the first country to announce a positive quarter,
may not have done so and the GFC would still be continuing today. 

Add to the above that these days, all knowledge (ok, a respectable
subset) is available via Wikipedia presented by Google. 
Whether the politicians like it or not, the national IQ is rising, the
population is getting an edumacation. 

Political allegiances with Newspapers no longer win elections although I
dare say it would seem that the delivery (or not) of election promises
are now hotly discussed in the various forums and unlike newspapers,
still there for the next elections.

The new Political kingmaker... The crowd sourced archives of the
Internet.

That would suggest to me that any politician that wants the fairer sex
vote will ensure the NBN is rolled out as promised...
Err, with fibre...
Err, underground...
Err, to the House...
(Please Malcolm, it's a really really good idea... Look how about we go
fifty fifty... You get it to the kerb, make 72-75 GHz ISM spectrum and
I'll get it the rest of the way....  ;-0  )

Unfortunately, it is exactly the voters that are now old enough to make
a difference to Australian politics that will probably build Skynet. Err
that would be a ;-)

/body