wired for sound...and video....and data
The battle lines are drawn. The battle for hearts and minds of the Australian electorate this year will be staged around....the environment? national security? interest rates?
Actually, Broadband speeds!
Labor today have outlined a new plan to upgrade the national telecommunications infrastructure so that 98% of the Australian population will have access to broadband speeds 40 times faster than they do today. Wow. How could they pull off such a masterstroke of technological advancement? Who will pay for such an outlandish scheme? The Future Fund of course!
By naming the Future Fund, "The Future Fund", the government has ensured that it's use can be as generically applied as it's name. If they had called it "The public servant Superannuation Stockpile", things might be a little different.
But they didn't, and Labor are eyeing it off as the Australian telecommunications infrastructure's saviour from going the way of the railways. And rightly so. The Future fund is made up of the proceeds from the sale of T3, the 3rd Share offering of Telstra, plus any unsold shares from that issue. Now that Telstra is a private company, they are only obliged to look out for the interests of their shareholders, and not the nation at large. Therefore, despite having a monopoly on the country's telco infrastructure, there is no real incentive for it to invest collossal amounts of money into improving the country's infrastructure, as the country is wide and the population sparse. It isn't in the best interests of the shareholders. Investment may improve the country's fortunes, but not necessarily Telstra's.
So Labor have taken the bull by the horns and are proposing to dip into the Future Fund, to use the proceeds of selling off the Australian Telco infrastructure to greatly enhance it's infrastructure. This will supposedly get Australia up to speed with the rest of the industrialised world, giving us a network on par with everyone else...
So is this investment really necessary? Will this really enhance Australia's competitiveness in the world?
Perhaps. Little Timmy downloading the 6th Season of "Lost" in his bedroom will think so, but it goes much further than Little Timmy (as is sometimes the case). Australia is a bloody long way from anywhere. That's a fact. But in this international climate of free trade agreements, Australia needs to be open for business. Distance cannot be a barrier. For a long time we have had the smarts. While we still dig things out of the ground for a dollar we also sell know how. Industry leaders recognise the fact that we need to get closer to the rest of the world, in order to remain competitive. As Rudd puts it, we need to engage in "Nation building for the 21st Century".
Labels: Australian Politics, Broadband, Federal Election, Kevin Rudd, Telstra
A Screw Loose?
Not even the news of some over-enthusiastic Novacastrians getting crash tackled by Iemma's security detail could arouse the slightest excitement for me in the snoozefest that has become the New South Wales State Election. As usual it took a nutter independent to add a bit of colour to what has been a funeral procession of an election. Care of Dylan Welch of the Sydney Morning Herald:
A Supreme Court judge has found the phrase "we're screwed" is offensive and
inappropriate to be used on how-to-vote cards for Saturday's state
election.
The judgement comes as a result of an appeal to the Supreme Court
by independent candidate for Wyong Greg Best, who had been ordered by the NSW
electoral commissioner to remove two voting cards containing the phrase "we're
screwed" and two containing the phrase "dickheads and wankers rule".
The
commissioner found the phrase could be offensive to people being handed the
campaign material.
Mr Best agreed to remove the "dickheads and wankers rule"
slogan but challenged the commissioner's decision on "we're screwed".
In her
judgement, Justice Virginia Bell found the commissioner had acted responsibly in
refusing Mr Best permission to use the slogan.
She said it was likely to
possibly be offensive to some among the "broad potential audience for election
material".
At first reading of the article I had a bit of a chuckle. Wankers and Dickheads? I don't think I'd want granny Higgins of the Presbyterian Ladies Society reading that, even if quite a few in the general population wouldn't find it offensive. Sorry, granny Higgins or any of the Presbyterian Ladies Society if you happen to be reading this blog, by the way.
But not for the first time I have sided with a nutter independant on an issue. I can recall references to being "Screwed" many times in general exhibition television. If Monique the fat fighting Freak off the Lardiest Shedder, can scream "arrrrrrrgh, I'm screwed" after a stomach churning walk up a hill, at 7:30 PM... on national television.... surely the Champion of Free Speech himself Greg Best of Wyong, can inform the residents of Wyong that they're screwed as well? It seems not. Further on in the article it describes where the lawyer and the judge debate whether context is necessary:
Mr Best's barrister, Ms Louise Byrne, and Ms Belinda Baker, representing
the electoral commission, spent about three hours in court today arguing whether
or not the phrase "we're screwed" could be deemed offensive to a reasonable
person at the polling booths.
"If someone walked into a party and said 'we're
screwed', unless they were engaged in group sex it is not [a sexual
connotation]," Ms Byrne said.
But Ms Baker disagreed. "The dictionary
definition of the word 'screwed' includes reference to a sexual act," she
said
It would seem to me that regardless of dictionary definitions, context is completely relevant. "Let's Screw" may be offensive, but "this candidate has a loose screw" is not... unless of course his partner happens to be particularly promiscuous, but that's undermining my own argument...
Screw is not a profanity. Contextually, this rather harmless word has the potential to be offensive but "We're Screwed", while rather defeatist, even for an independent, is not offensive. Not even to Granny Higgins.
So Greg Best, Warrior of Free Speech, you have my moral support as you take the good fight to the court of appeals. Let's hope you're not Screwed.
Labels: Greg Best, New South Wales Election, New South Wales Politics
Let the Character Assassinations Begin
Bring out your dead, or how Teflon John got it wrong.
The main problem with the moral high ground, is that if you choose to occupy it, you must be high on morals.
At the start of the year Labor brought out a couple of pre-campaign policy samplers. Nothing too meaty, and more to do with intent than anything else. As was to be expected, they were Pooh-Poohed by the government and all was well with the universe. But after another poll came out in February, this turned personal.
For once the tired old "Labor can't be trusted with your money" rhetoric clearly wasn't making inroads into the electorate. Why not this time? For one, it's a hard position to defend when interest rates are rising. Saying they'd rise even more if your opponent was in charge doesn't really hold a lot of water either. The mortgage belt tend to respond to the evidence before them, reactive animals that they are. And Rudd just looks like a banker... Labor = economic ruin, is a hard policy to promote when the supposed rabid unionist in charge could be your financial planner, or accountant, or bank manager.
So if you can't deride their character on policy, undermine their moral character was the call. Some liberal strategist who is probably down the centrelink by now, dug up a supposedly scandalous, but in reality quite harmless bit of info on lunches Rudd had held with Brian Burke, the corrupt ex-premier of WA. An outcry into the moral character of Rudd would follow surely..."Saint Kevin the fallen" would be the cat calls from the baying mob. He attended lunchs with this judas? Noooo... The reverberations throughout the electorate were... missing.
Merely a day or so later it came out that Liberal minister for the environment Ian Campbell had had a meeting with the very same ebola virus-like Brian Burke. He promptly resigned his post, in order not to taint the morally irridescent Holy Trinity of Costello, Abbott and Howard.
Body Count after the smoke had cleared? ALP = 0 Libs = 1
Why didn't the Electorate jump up and down and burn effigies of Rudd after this attack? I'd like to think that the Australian electorate are savvy enough to realise Politicians encounter many people in the business they are in, and the fact you cannot account for the high moral standing of all you encounter is not a fault of yourself. The fact that Ian Campbell had to be sacrificed in order for the Government's mud to stick, highlights the absurdity of the attack. Is Ian Campbell in some way morally compromised because of meeting with a lobbyist now proved to be corrupt? No. Unless he was of very little moral fibre prior to this (I won't be tempted to comment on that).
The upshot? People in White houses shouldn't fling mud. And yet the McCarthy like witchhunt continued into all MP's wheelings and dealings.... next up and probably with some legitimacy, Shadow Attorney-General Kelvin Thomson resigned after it was revealed he provided a character reference to one Tony Mokbel for a liquor licence in 2001... ill advised at the very least, considering Mokbel has been charged in absentia with importing cocaine and implicated in the murders of other Melbourne underworld figures. His poor old interns will probably be wondering if the character references he gives them will be worth the paper they are written on now. The actual nature of Thomson's relationship with Mokbel never really did come out, but was met with muted vigour by the Government. Once bitten twice shy, perhaps, or perhaps it sent a Government scurrying to their own records to weed out any possible impropriety anybody they had ever dealt with had committed since their dealings...
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 1
The ALP hit back barely a week later, with news that Minister for Ageing (but not an Ageing Minister, like some in the Holy Trinity), held shares in a bio-technology company , thus arising a conflict of interest, as said company related to his portfolio. While it initially appeared as an innocent mistake, it later emerged that as an act of contrition, he sold the shares and donated the proceeds to a "charity". Unfortunately the supposed "Charity" wasn't a charity at all, but the conservative values group Family Council Of Queensland...Looks like Santo forgot to read the Clause about "conflicts of interest".
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 2
Has it ended? Maybe... for what started as a desperate character assassination of Saint Kev, in order to peg a few points back in the polls, would appear to have backfired, and the Government's own moral credibility is the one on the line.... careful what you wish for eh John?
Labels: Australian Politics, Ian Campbell, John Howard, Kelvin Thomson, Kevin Rudd, Santo Santoro
