Our choice: Fate or Future

bushfirebill Uncategorized

Whether Australia is a cork on the water, floating around dependent on economic tides and political wave action is the single most important question facing the nation today.

Electric Broadband Postcard New stamp

Our two-speed economy is not working.

We must find alternatives to manufacturing cars that motorists do not want, ships that never get off the drawing board, making appliances and gizmos that are made better and cheaper in low-cost labour economies… and the “Fly-In/Fly-Out” mentality that tells us digging up dirt is the only way to national prosperity.

One thing that cannot be brokered, dismantled or diluted is our ability to think: our native “smarts”.

We have very good educational standards, high literacy skills and a skilled, adaptable workforce. Yet our main economic preoccupation is digging holes in the ground and flogging off the dirt to nations willing to add value to it, where we are not. Mining has caused our economy to become “two-speed” – one part of it is booming and the other is declining.

We seem to have applied little thought to the following question: “What do we do to bring our economy fully up to speed?”

Mining sucks skills and resources from other segments of our industry. It forces our dollar higher and makes exporting manufactured goods un-competitive with the rest of the world.

We need to find a way of reconciling the undoubted good fortune that we have stumbled upon by being located above some of the world’s greatest mineral riches, and the desperate plight of our old standby industries struggling to make a quid where our goods and services are simply too expensive for other nations to purchase.

We need to find a future, not just settle for a fate based on doing what we have always done, even after it becomes unrewarding and un-competitive.

Abbott & Costello (Turnbull)

With these thoughts in mind I turned to the ABC web site to read an article by Kevin Morgan, on the NBN v. the Coalition’s #Fraudband copper rehash.

Morgan, who styles himself as a “commentator” on telecommunications policy and regulation, disappointed me. Greatly.

As I read through the column my eyes opened wider with shock that someone so supposedly well-informed could come up with the relentlessly negative commentary that he had presented.

It almost sounded as if he was personally offended by the NBN.

For example, what a stupid thing to write:

It’s now demonstrable that the Government’s all-fibre NBN, with its nominal price tag of $37.4 billion, cannot be built within either its promised budget or timeframe. In the first 10 weeks of this year, NBN Co, the company charged with the fibre rollout, passed only an additional 28 households a day. At that rate it would take 1,200 years to build the NBN.

And from a supposed “expert” too. A slow start is extrapolated out to the run of the project and becomes “1,200 years”. Does Morgan sincerely believe the NBN will take 1,200 years to build? I doubt it. It’s such an idiotic, misguided thing to write that it leads his readers to question his sincerity and his motives for writing it. And this too:

Indeed, it seems the only issue in play is the differing speeds promised by the Labor Government’s fibre to every home policy (FTTH) and those offered under the Coalition’s fibre to the node (FTTN) proposal…

What rock do they drag these people from under? And why is the ABC publishing such arrant nonsense?

OF COURSE, when it comes to the internet and telecommunications in general, speed is everything, absolutely everything.

Speed is fundamental to the very nature of any telecommunications system. Speed defines telecommunications.

It’s not 100mbps v. 25mbps we need to consider. It’s the almost limitless potential speed of FTTP (Fibre To the Premises) v. the Brick Wall that FTTN (Fibre To The Node) is going to run into in a few short years.

Abbott And Turnbull Space Guns

You don’t have to rebuild the NBN to get the mega and giga speeds our country is going to need in the very near future. There’s no need to roll out new cable or dig new ditches nationwide to upgrade the NBN.

You simply upgrade the switching equipment at the exchange, as better and faster technology becomes available. That way great leaps in technology can be applied efficiently to data distribution centres, and rolled out through existing infrastructure painlessly, without having to literally start again from the ground up.

After the upgrade, the new speeds and data flows roll out through the already built and commissioned pipeline, built at 2013 prices, not the inflated prices of some future decade.

The pipeline stays in the ground ready for gigabits per second any time the switch gear catches up.

To upgrade FTTN you have to pull out all the old, power-hungry cabinets – 60,000 of them – and build what Labor is building now anyway, with all the added up front extra costs to FTTN that building it right first via the NBN time avoids. By the time he’s half-way through his article, Morgan has characterized the NBN as a…

… train wreck that the Coalition has been obliged to frame their policy {around}. …

… thats right, a “train wreck”. Total destruction, complete disarray, mass deaths and suffering. A train wreck. What a spirit of adventure Kevin Morgan has! He can only see the past:

The reality is FTTN is by far and away the most commonly used technology to take fibre close to the consumer.

So if it was alright yesterday… then it must be alright for tomorrow.

fRAUDBAND tRUCK

Australia is a country that relies for its economic success on digging holes in the ground.

But it cannot rely forever on selling dirt to other, more enterprising economies, nor should it.

Morgan’s thesis (if you can call it that) is effectively that we should just continue doing what we have always done, that we should, by implication, continue to rely on mining, and when that peters out, we’ll have to find something else to do.

Gee what would that be?

This whole attitude that we must always accept second-best, that we don’t “do” high tech, that we should never set ourselves up for anything in the future, that we should only go by what other countries are doing (and do no more) is a death knell for Australia’s competitiveness in the not so distant future.

We are already running a “two-speed” economy. Exporters and manufacturers can’t compete with the dollar being so high. We will continue to run two-speed if we don’t get off our political arses and stop justifying outdated junk copper technology, worth not much more than its scrap value, by labelling ourselves as not good enough for the best.

This is when even this “best” is almost not enough to surmount the hurdles our economy needs to become competitive in the world, in more ways than just digging holes in the ground.

We need to become a one-speed, NOT two-speed economy.

The NBN will do that, or at least will help, but the cultural and technological cringers in the Coalition and in their fans like Henry Morgan will doom us to always being one step behind, while the rest of the world gets on with coping with the 21st century.

The question we must all ask ourselves is do we want a fate, or do we want a future?

To deliberately pick a second best option in telecommunications, like #Fraudband, when the best is underway and being built as the NBN, is vandalism of the highest order against the Australian people and the economy.

As Nick Ross of the ABC put it so tellingly, it’s like evaluating the viability of Sydney Harbour Bridge simply in terms of how much profit collecting tolls will generate.

It’s not about tolls, contracts, internet plans, a few dollars here and there spent laying cable (I know its billions, but judged against potential returns – real returns – it’s peanuts), or whether we could better spend the money paying for subsidized nannies, funding well-off retirees who use superannuation as a tax dodge or propping up expensive, exclusive private schools that sustain networks not of intelligence or enterprise, but of mates who throw easy business opportunities to each other.

Point Piper Fraudband Node 2

It’s about looking forward to a way where we can bust the future of Australia right open and become not only a lucky country, but a leading nation in this competitive world, relying on intelligence and not the dumb luck that’s got us by so far.

We’re going to lose our car industry soon, with all the economic death and destruction for the manufacturing sector that loss will entail. What fools we will look like if, faced with having to re-skill our country, we need to rely on the technology of the early 1900s, as Morgan advocates, not just to talk to each other, but to talk to and participate in the future world.

2,081 thoughts on “Our choice: Fate or Future”

  3. Fiona

    [to tracky dacks and runners …]

    When Gus O’Donnell got ‘done’ by Queenie his wife was ill.

    Gus was nervous (which is a bit strange as he was the most accomplished Civil Servant of not only his generation but for a couple of hundred years) so I went with him.

    We drank a lot of :

    before we went. And then had an argument about which tie I should wear.

    I felt very out of place – getting home to the Barbican was good.

  4. Thinkbig put it to youse. I have been watching those channels plus my p2p, iraq goals and others. I have seen most Dragon games for the last 4 years. Foxtel occasionally stops a feed , but really, the web is unstoppable. Foxtel also stream on the web to subscribers, but the content is very average, particularly with sport. I give nothing to anything tied to that mongrel

  9. Can’t one buy a title on Ebay as a Knight of some wreck just of the English coast? It costs less if you print your own certificate.

  10. I wonder how far 6Pack and Missus have got.

    I had visions of truckie lad the other day enjoying the scenery at about 150kph on his way.

    Probably half way across the Arafura Sea in the car at the moment.

    😀

  12. fiona – Before I go off (even more) our pommie cousins: Gus is a huge admirer of our Finlay Crisp and Kenneth Bailey.

  13. He has good taste (and sense).

    I attended Professor Crisp’s lectures in 1973, and well remember Jack Richardson’s stories of Kenneth Bailey (and others).

  16. listen..perhaps one of you tech heads could help me…Out here in the Murray mallee we get good digital reception for the commercials (which we NEVER watch) but shithouse for the ABC. which I have permanently fixed on channel with a hex-head roofing screw through the dial!….Why is and how can I get a better reception on ABC.?

  17. Fiona

    [of Kenneth Bailey ]

    KB KC I know quite a bit about.

    When the Civil Service decided I needed a ‘proper’ security clearance it seems that I was dobbed in from here – the idea that I knew a bit about Millner, Petrov and Wilfred Burchett – caused them to put a ‘caveat’ on what I could see/be told about there.

    A big ‘mandarin’ once said to me ‘OK, all that’s washed away now. You’ve been checking our 40’s/50’s stuff for a while and what I want to know is “was Roger Hollis a Russian?”.

    Gold!

  18. I am finding it extremely irritating that the media, and other self-interested parties, such as Australian Marriage Equality and Tony Abbott, are portraying the position of the Prime Minister as being the same as Abbott’s, that is, Opposed to Same Sex Marriage. Misleadingly so, because, as it may literally be the case that the Prime Minister is opposed to Same Sex Marriage, I doubt it is for the same reason that Tony Abbott is opposed. As others have postulated, and as I have to agree, I think her opposition is for the more arcane reason, I suppose you could characterise it as, of being opposed to Marriage, per se. Therefore, to be consistent with her own beliefs about adult relationships in general, that she does not believe in Marriage between a man and a woman, she has to oppose Same Sex Marriage for the same reason.

    Fair enough, I reckon. That’s how I would vote as well, if I was an MP. I don’t believe in Marriage either. My Partner and I didn’t believe in rings either. We were joined together spiritually, and that’s all that counted to us.

    However, that is not to say that, if a Conscience Vote in federal parliament majority approved of Same Sex Marriage, that I would be opposed to THAT, in practice. I wouldn’t. The people’s representatives would have spoken and would have given their approval. So that would be that. And then we could get on to attending to more weighty matters of State.

    Which is why I think it is important for the Prime Minister to outline her position clearly, so that she doesn’t get lumped into the same basket as Abbott.

    Today she got halfway there, when, at her Press Conference, she outlined how her position, as leader of the Labor Party, was completely different to Abbott’s, from the point of view that she HAS given her MPs a Conscience Vote on the issue, and he hasn’t. Such that, if he did, then Same Sex Marriage would most likely pass the Australian Parliament, as it has in New Zealand.

    She just has to also colour in the rest of the picture relating to her own personal stance so that people don’t continue to have the wrong impression about it. I really do think they’d understand if she explained it the way I have.

  19. I’ve been watching PVO treading a fine line on irony over at Twitter. He posted this:

    Peter van Onselen ‏@vanOnselenP 37m

    People need to be fair to Tony Abbott. He’d love to do more long form interviews, but his minders tell him not to and he does what he’s told

    And this:

    Peter van Onselen ‏@vanOnselenP 28m

    I don’t understand some of the anger out there…what’s wrong with a future PM not doing long form interviews bc his staff tell him not to?

    It’s sarcasm, apparently. Trouble is, it’s so difficult to tell the difference between a comment like that and a genuine defence of Abbott’s behaviour. We’ve been fed so much “that’s just Tony” over the past couple of years that this just looks like more of the same.

    Maybe that’s the issue. Maybe the entire press gallery have been engaging in sophisticated sarcasm since 2010. “Oh yes, Abbott has run a very good political campaign, he won’t make a mess of the country – heh heh just kidding folks, sucked in, you voted for him.”

  20. jaycee,
    Have you thought about contacting the ABC in South Australia about your problem?

    I did hear once from my late OH that it had something to do with the Commercial Channels being able to afford the biggest and best transmitters, cf the ABC, who use Repeater Towers to farm out their signal, thereby weakening it in transmission. I also think I remember him saying that you could multiplex the signal to improve it, which I think means you buy a certain type of antenna which is able to concentrate the signal before it goes down the line to your TV.

    Nevertheless, Bushfire Bill is probably your best source for the correct answer. 😉

  21. You may be interested in this:

  23. Aguirre
    Instead of offering lame excuses PvO should be asking why it is that Abbott’s minders won’t let him do long form interviews.

    We all know the answer of course, Abbott can’t handle more than a foot massage and a thirty-second sound bite without losing the plot. He can’t be trusted to do anything more than the briefest of rehearsed pressers. Let him do more and he’ll confess to telling lies, or he’ll admit he hasn’t read something important, or he’ll trot out something appalling about women and ironing or about being being scared of homosexuals.

    We can’t have the great ignorant masses realising that Abbott is a complete idiot until after the election. After that no-one will be able to hide his incompetence. Perhaps his minders are planning to use a hologram instead of the real Tony. That would explain that odd thing at the broadband policy launch – it was a tech rehearsal.

  24. victoria

    [here is the latest letter from the AFP to Graham Perret on progress of his complaint]

    It reads to me like AGS is writing both sides of the correspondence on this.

  27. I reckon I could manage to do the same job as Abbott will tonight. Here are all the answers he’ll be likely to call on:

    1. You’re exactly right, and that is why the first thing we’ll do on coming to office is get rid of the carbon tax, to ease the financial pressure on all Australians.

    2. There’s no doubt Australians are feeling cost of living pressures, and my booklet (holds it up) has a detailed and fully costed plan to address those concerns. And our first order of business is to abolish the carbon tax… (segue into answer 1)

    3. You’ll find all the detail in my booklet (holds it up). But I will say in relation to that, that there is no doubt… (seque into answer 2)

    4. I agree. This is a Bad government getting Worse. We have a detailed plan to get the budget into surplus… no, we can’t give you a deadline for that, but by cutting red tape and abolishing the carbon tax (seque into answer 1)

    5. Thank you, it’s very kind of you to say so. But modestly forbids me to answer that directly Mr Speers.

    6. (in the unlikely case of anything in any way specific or containing traces of scrutiny) Ha ha, heh heh, ahhh, hah, let me say, nghhh, har haw, that’s something we’ll be addressing, arrrghh, closer to the election.

  29. Momma Cat,
    This is another example of how the Labor position is so frequently misrepresented. A few weeks ago I read an account of a conversation with Kerry Phelps in the MSM. She was reported as offering a throw-away line, wtte, everyone’s in favour of SSM, it’s just Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard standing in the way. (She may even have given Julia top billing, i.e. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott). It’s almost Impossible to correct these falsehoods, unless the journalist or interviewer challenges it immediately – Churchill’s famous observation: a lie is half-way round the world before the truth has its trousers on. Of course all too often the communicator believes or chooses to believe the misrepresentation.

  31. “Nevertheless, Bushfire Bill is probably your best source for the correct answer. ”
    Bushfire fuckin’ Bill!!!…is there anything that bastard doesn’t know????
    Where does that “Lensman” get his info from…; Isacc Asimov?

  33. And my alternative is, BB? I think the all-or-nothing lofty ideal world is best suited to the greens, not this labor voter.

    Well I’ve been off for a few hours helping in a Home Cinema installation (and a stunning design it is too… 4th floor of a Woolahra mansion just purchased by someone with a lazy $22 million) and I find I’m the world’s worst, being told to “cut it out” etc. for suggesting people give up supporting Murdoch in his Foxtel business.

    If youse can’t understand the difference between (attempted) persuasion, with argument, with-OUT threats,.. and “bullying”… then you must have led very sheltered childhoods.

    Murdoch is the monster who is substantially funding the Coalition with priceless negative coverage of the government’s every action and policy, and with vitriol and nastiness, the likes of which we have never seen in this fair land.

    In return they have clearly given him certain assurances regarding his current and future businesses here, in particular Foxtel.

    He seems to be relaxed and comfortable about the campaign he is running for the Coalition, because he has just invested millions in expanding Foxtel to cater for blanket BBC programming material, taking it away from the Free To Air ABC and forcing anyone who wants to view the BBC into paying him for the privilege.

    His newspapers heavily criticise the ABC at every turn. His editorial policy is repeated by the ABC (giving it a certain air of “credibility”) in almost every news and current affairs show they run.

    The IPA (of which he is certainly a major funder) supplies back-up shills for the Coalition free of charge, and thus not subject to our electoral donations laws.

    He supplied expensive television studio facilities to Abbott and Turnbull, free of charge, for the launch of their #Fraudband policy.

    And to point this out, suggesting that a viable alternative is cancelling a subscription to Foxtel and pointing out that you’d hardly miss it (similar to hundreds of thousands of other ex-subscribers)… is “bullying”?

    I shakes me head. I truly does.

    Murdoch runs Australia. That is about to be confirmed in September, by all indications. He is the greatest internal threat to our democracy in Australian political history.

    Who would want to help his profits and make his existence even more credible?

    If his newspaper and publishing arm (of which Foxtel is probably the ony money-making division) goes bust then he will be closer to having to close it down. It’s on its own now: a separate business unit.

    Australia is the only country where Murdoch operates where his Pay TV assets are part of his publishing spin-off. Shit sheets like the Daily Telegraph, The Australian and the Herald Sun will be relying on subsidies from Foxtel profits to stay alive.

    I point out these facts not as a bully, but as a public service.

  34. ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ seems to have filled the News.

    The Nth Koreans nuking Tokyo would be a relief at the moment.

  36. What happened today in West, which is North of WACO(look, it’s the Americans and beyond that I suppose it is safe to say it is West of somewhere 🙂 ), just proves without a shadow of a doubt how much Disaster Porn has become a staple of 24/7 News channels.

    I’m over it, frankly. I, myself, on behalf of the family, have made an Executive Decision to now only watch the initial report, and then no more.

    It’s desensitising us to cataclysmic disasters, to see it over and over and over again. Which has, as a corollary, and especially in the political sphere, the effect of desensitising us to cruelty delivered to other human beings. I could give you plenty of examples, but I’m sure you get my drift.

    So, I watched ‘Adventure Time’ instead this afternoon, instead of endless analysis of this latest disaster. Especially considering not one of the gormless ABC24 interviewers/Talking Heads, thought to point out what must have been the case here, and that is, “Do you think the explosion at the Fertiliser Factory was caused by lax safety standards and cutting corners to save money?”

  39. Hi all… I need cheering up.

    On top of all the disaster p0rn over the past couple of days comes news that that my mums medical tests suggest interstitual lung disease and has to have further tests to confirm.

    I lost my favourite aunt two yrs ago to asbestosis and my dad worked at James Hardie for 30yrs so it not knowing exactly what it is scaring the crap out me.

  40. C@tmomma.
    I agree. I do not want to see it over and over again. The twin-towers is a case-in-point. If you didn’t have pstd, you would have after watching replays of that for months.

  43. I have not heard anyone mention lax safety standards, bad land use zoning, cutting corners to save money, no unions to monitor worker safety.

    Who the hell allowed a factory like that near a school, nursing home and housing?

  46. Spacey,

    Hugs is all I can offer. Understand how you are feeling and I hope your Mum’s tests show better than results than you expect. Positive thoughts for you at this time.

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