View From The Couch - 14/Sep/2016

Speaking Of Walkouts...

Everyday brings more stupidity. Heck, not content with the abject Stupidity of an Abbott Government in 2013, we-the-people opted to vote back in the same bunch of stupid politicians from the Coalition but also three (not, one, not just the red-headed flaming political retard that is Pauline Hanson but THREE flaming political retards) OneNation senators.

Today was Pauline Hanson's maiden speech in the Senate which bore a striking similarity in tone and classlessness and crassness that marked her maiden speech in the Lower House twenty years ago. I guess the more things change, the more we find out they really don't.

Twenty years and four days after claiming the nation was in danger of being "swamped by Asians" in her maiden speech as the independent Member for Oxley, Senator Hanson revived and updated her original warning, telling her Senate colleagues she "was back", warmly thanking a packed public gallery, and claiming she was there to help a nation "in fear". 

"…Australia is now seeing changes in suburbs predominantly Muslim," she said. "Tolerance towards other Australians is no longer the case. Our law courts are disrespected and our prisons have become breeding grounds for Muslims to radicalise inmates. 

"Muslims are imprisoned at almost three times the average rate. The rate of unemployed and public dependency is two to three times greater than the national average. 

"Muslims are prominent in organised crime with associated violence and drug dealing. 

"Anti-social behaviour is rampant, fuelled by hyper-masculine and misogynist culture. 

Multiple social surveys find that neighbours of Muslim settlement are suffering from collapsing social cohesion and fear of crime. 

"Australians in general are more fearful." 

It was then that the Greens Senators began leaving the chamber, but Senator Hanson, who had began her speech with a shaky voice, was undeterred. 

"Islam can not have a significant presence in Australia, if we are to live in an open, secular and cohesive society," she said. 

"Never before in Australia's history have we seen civil unrest and terror associated with a so-called religion and followers of that faith. 

"We have seen the destruction we have seen it is causing around the world. If we don't make changes now, there will be no hope in the future. 

"Have no doubt that we will be living under Sharia law and treated as second-class citizens with second-class rights, if we keep heading down the path with the attitude, 'She'll be right, mate'."

That the Green senators walked out is not surprising. I'm trying to imagine myself as a senator listening to this tripe, and I have to admit it would be hard not to walk out, but a rational side in me says you kind of have to stay in the ring for the good fight. Leaving the battlefield is defeat.

The SMH ran their little poll at the bottom of that article asking whether we think it was right for the Greens senators to do as they did. So far the response i split 52-48. It's a good question, one which I struggle to answer decisively. On the one hand I think a senator of the land deserves to be heard out, but on the other, there is a limit to the stupid prejudice one can lend one's credibility to, in listening (or even pretending to listen). It's an ethical dilemma.

One view is that by walking out, it gives validation to the undeserving Pauline Hanson. Yet sometimes there are showings so bad, you just have to walk out. Like Malcolm Roberts.

'Tis Spring, The Stupid Is In Full Bloom

I didn't blog this yesterday because well, where do you start with this massive tumult of stupid that has suddenly walked into our Senate. Not since Incitatus in ancient Rome's senate have we witnessed anything so spectacularly dumb as Malcolm Roberts.

Praising Britain's recent decision to leave the European Union, which had the power to set laws and regulations affecting domestic laws in member countries, Senator Roberts called on Australians to launch an "Aus-exit" from institutions including the UN and International Monetary Fund. "Australia's values and way of life are also at risk from insidious institutions such as the unelected swill that is the United Nations," he said. 

"The EU is a template for total socialist domination of Europe through unelected bodies, such as the IMF, forcing their frightening agenda on the people. It is also the UN's template, and Australia must leave the UN."

"We need an Aus-exit," he declared.
Senator Roberts profusely praised his mentor Pauline Hanson as "Our Pauline". Video footage shows the One Nation leader repeatedly shaking her head and rolling her eyes.

He might not be the full horse but he certainly is the horse's ass. Really, Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition were so distraught with having to deal with Ricky Muir and Glenn Lazarus, they've fiddled the rules and thus allowed back in this spectre of idiocy we had hoped to consign to history. Truly, this is pathetic.

Jesus Fucking Christ what have we come to in this country?

News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Apr/2016

The End Of The Road For Bronwyn Bishop

It's minor news but I love it anyway. Bronwyn Bishop has lost her preselection for her seat of McKellar. She had long overstayed her welcome in Australian politics and she really won't be missed by the middle Australia that had no influence over her pre-selection. The more interesting aspect of her demise as a political figure might be that her ideological lovechild Tony Abbott had a hand in unseating her.

Tony Abbott has publicly praised Bronwyn Bishop amid anger in sections of the Liberal Party that the former prime minister urged his supporters in Mackellar to end Mrs Bishop's political career in Saturday's preselection vote. 

A bloc of 12 votes for Walter Villatora, a member of the hard right who was backed by Mr Abbott, became instrumental in Mrs Bishop's defeat by Jason Falinksi. 

Mr Falinksi is a member of the Liberal left - the moderate faction - and it is highly-unusual for the hard right to work towards the ascendancy of a moderate in a seat previously held by a conservative like Mrs Bishop. 

The 73 year-old former Speaker retained the backing of the centre-right in NSW despite loud public calls for her retirement and agreement in the senior ranks of the Turnbull Government that her time was up.

Members of the hard right were playing down talk of an official deal on Sunday. "There was no deal done, this one was free of charge," said a source. 

But the centre-right is convinced that the hard right planned the hit on Mrs Bishop in collusion with the left and that Mr Abbott had been "hitting the phones hard" to ensure that outcome.

It doesn't really matter. The woman was an ideological nut job that foreshadowed the Tea Party style partisan politics coming to Australia. She was also responsible for running up a huge bill on the public purse, flying around in helicopters on private business, while her resume shows she didn't really do much except be a big noise on behalf of the hard right. 

She really was a terrible human being before being an awful member of Parliament and even an awful Speaker of the House to boot. Together with Sophie Mirabella, it is best we consign her to the dustbin of history as soon as possible.

Double Dissolution Coming Down The Pike

Malcolm Turnbull recalled parliament early to debate that ABCC bill for three weeks. The Senate voted it down in a day. That now activated the 2 July date for a Federal election.

The sanguine news for both major parties is that the polls are pretty even.

The latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend put support for the Coalition and Labor across the country on a knife-edge at 50-50, assuming an allocation of preferences similar to those at the last election.

The national survey of 1402 electors was conducted between April 14-16 and showed support for the Coalition had dropped by a statistically significant 3 percentage points since the March poll. 

This equates to a 3.5 per cent swing away from the Coalition's share of the vote achieved at the September 2013 election, raising the prospect the election could produce a government with a wafer-thin majority or even another hung Parliament.

The only thing the Coalition have got going is that Malcolm Turnbull is far more popular than Bill Shorten. It's not much to go on if you're a backbencher looking to be wiped out in a 3.5-4.0% swing, but Bob Hawke with his personal popularity won on the back of such numbers in incumbency so it's not like they're toast just yet.

I'm sure I'll get plenty of opportunities to bitch even moe and louder about this truly horrible Coalition Government in the coming weeks so I'll just leave that bit for now. Stay tuned, I shall be whinging with all my might.

Meanwhile The NSW Government Wants To Go Orwellian On Our Sorry Butts

This is just awful, and it's flying under the radar.

On March 22, 2016, a set of bills was introduced to the New South Wales Parliament by Deputy Premier and Minister for Justice and Police Troy Grant that included the Serious Crime Prevention Orders Bill and Criminal Legislation Amendment (Organised Crime and Public Safety) Bill. 

The acts upon which this amendment is based are shockingly outdated bases for common law. Most date back to the early 90s and one was written in 1900, a time when the faces of both crime and civil liberties were starkly different than they are today. This would be one matter if the intent of the amendment had been to more clearly define violent crimes--such as differentiating hate crimes from others--but instead, the amendment's stated purpose was to "recast the offence of dealing with property suspected of being proceeds of crime so as to adopt certain provisions of the corresponding offence in the Criminal Code of the Commonwealth."

As another site puts it:

The bill would grant police the power to cut off your internet, terminate you from your job, tell you who can associate with, and where you can go if they think you have some association with a “serious” crime. 

These “serious crimes” can range from anything as minor as theft, possession of a cannabis plant or illegal gambling to major offences like homicide, kidnapping and extortion.

They are essentially the same laws used for a terror suspect, but they can be applied to any innocent person in New South Wales without their chance at a proper criminal trial. 

Why should you be worried?
If the police, who are often wrong, believe you were in some way connected to a crime, they can impose all of these restrictions on your life without having to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. 

One of the most concerning parts of the legislation is that it can apply to a range of potentially completely innocent people.

As the NSW Bar Association explained, it’s not just for people convicted of the crime – it’s anyone that’s seen to “facilitate” it, which is a very vague term.

You could even get done for simply lending your phone or car to a friend who uses it for a criminal act.

What’s even more sinister is that there’s also basically no reasonable way to appeal the control order once you cop it.

You can only prove it by way of ‘legal error’, which means it’s not a matter of proving whether you’re innocent or not, you have to prove the police didn’t apply the procedure properly.

Pre-crime here we come! It's sinister in that it tries to set up a zone where a person is not innocent because they're suspected of something, which would overturn the principle of innocent until proven otherwise. The government has minimal onus to present its case in any detail, is enabled into malicious prosecutions, and can't be stopped unless they happen to trip up on procedure. Keep in mind, we have no 'Miranda Rights' made explicit in this country, so procedural errors of the police are less likely to be spotted by the legal profession. This is like a leap back to the18th century. 

The terrible irony course is that the party wanting to do this is called the 'Liberal' Party. The party that supposedly values individual freedoms.  

"Vote Mal, Eat Pal"

Malcolm Turnbull, Stunt PM

Well, here we are. Malcolm Turnbull has put the nation on an election footing.

The Prime Minister used a snap press conference in Canberra to reveal he had visited the Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove and advised him to prorogue the Parliament - officially ending the current session - before also using the Governor General's powers to recall both houses to sit for three weeks from April 18, ahead of a re-scheduled May 3 budget.

The move, which relied on the little-used provisions set out in section 5 of the constitution, means the seven-week pre-budget parliamentary break leading up to the scheduled May 10 budget has been halved with the special sitting dedicated entirely to consideration of a once-defeated bill to re-establish the Howard-era Australian Building and Construction Commission and the already twice-defeated registered organisations bill. 

Both bills have come up against stiff Senate opposition from Labor, the Greens, and six of the eight cross benchers, almost all of whom were elected in 2013. 

Passing them - both articles of faith for the conservative pro-Abbott wing of the party - would be a major win for Mr Turnbull's internal prestige. But their rejection would be even more advantageous, allowing him to run a full-throated anti-union militancy campaign in which he would attempt to paint Labor's Bill Shorten as a fellow traveller. 

Mr Turnbull's action follows last week's successful passage of changes to Senate voting procedures which ended elaborate and opaque preference deals, and will almost certainly mean fewer independent and minor party senators will be elected in future.

So it turns out that not only the micro-parties wildly successful at stifling the Tony Abbott government's agenda, they've now become the victims of their own success. Yet that is only the passing story; the big story is how Malcolm Turnbull waited until this moment to spring the ABCC bill which is classic Liberal Party union-bashing. What we're now figuring out is that the ABCC bill was Turnbull's ace in the hole and he has been lying in the reeds waiting for the Senate voting changes to go through before he sprang this trap on the crossbench senators. 

Peter Hartcher seems to think it was a brilliant move. 

And while it's high stakes, for Turnbull it's actually low risk. Why?  

He has issued a challenge to Labor, the Greens and the independent senators to join the government in a Senate vote to impose law and order in the construction industry.
The strong-arm union in the industry, the CFMEU, has gone rogue and the government is intent on taming it.

The government has a bill before the Senate to reintroduce a specialised federal regulator, the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The ABCC was created by the Howard government and dismantled by Labor.

The Senate has already rejected the bill once. Labor and the Greens are intent on protecting the CFMEU, a major donor and client of both parties, and some of the Senate independents voted with them. 

By asking the Governor-General to prorogue the Parliament and then bring back the Senate to deal with this specifically, Turnbull has put maximum pressure and maximum scrutiny on the Senate. 

If the Senate refuses, Turnbull has promised to dissolve both houses of Parliament and take the country to an early election to get his way. 

If it buckles, he will let the Parliament run its normal three years and call a customary general election - for the House and half the Senate - in September or October. 

Turnbull figures he can't lose. If the Senate agrees, he gets his way and he is seen to be a strong, determined leader. The Senate crossbenchers will hesitate to frustrate him again.
If the Senate refuses, Turnbull calls a double dissolution election which, on the current outlook, he would win handily. He would then hold a joint sitting of both houses to legislate the bills. Again, he gets his way.

Win-win scenario for the incumbents right there. The Turnbull government has turned out to be an extension of the Abbott government simply because he can't persuade and wrangle the lunar right of his party. It's only improvement is how deft Turnbull has been to talk about a lot of things without committing to anything. The worst case might be all the talk about the necessity of tax reform and then curling away from all the important reforms on the agenda, only to turn around and run a scare campaign on what the ALP had to offer to the discussion. It's understandable that it's politics; it's less understandable that Turnbull thinks this is him being of better behaviour than Tony Abbott. If the base is so low, incremental improvements don't net you points.

Also, all of this Senate reform manoeuvre puts the Greens in an interesting light. The Greens colluded with the Coalition government to put through the changes to the Senate voting rules. To that end, they abandoned their own marriage equality proposal. They sold out the micro-parties so they can secure a monopoly on being the third party in the Senate. As the third force in the Senate, they're doing a much worse job than the Australian democrats did back in the 80s and early 90s. The question is, is this the moment that the Greens are shown to be no different from 'the bastards' and lose credibility with the electorate? Right now, they look like a party that's only init for the power and their own pay checks. 

As for the ALP, they're in a zone of irrelevance. It's hard to see them fight back to the middle with the policies they've got. Every time Climate Change becomes front and centre for the public, the votes seem to bleed to the Greens, and every time there's a pushback against doing anything, the votes bleed right to the Coalition. The same could be said for taxation - every time they talk about the tax system needing reform and how the multinational corporations need to pay tax the votes bleed left to the Greens, and every time they mention cutting negative gearing, the votes bleed out to the right.

 It's as if the ALP are in a no-man's land waving their policies around as if they're going to make a difference. There are already grumbles amongst ALP voters about wanting to replace Bill Shorten. When I ask them who they want, I get answers like Plibersek, Wong and Albo. It's as if the ALP voters don't understand just how destructive the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd swaps were to electoral confidence. I'm not much of a Bill Shorten supporter but as a long-time pinko, I think the ALP needs to make a proper fist of contesting the election with Shorten as leader and Plibersek as deputy, and not make noises about polls dictating a swap of leadership. They need to grow up and fight a good fight like adults instead of infighting and squabbling like student politicians. Turnbull is eminently beatable, given that his party won't let him be his best self.

Dogs Are Better People Than Politicians

Couldn't Keep Denying

It amazes me that the Abbott government keeps limping on being the way it is. Normally, being the host nation for something like APEC or the G-20 burnishes the standing of a nation, but somehow Tony Abbott and his miserable government managed to lower the standing of Australia, simply by being their climate-change-denying selves. At the end, Tony Abbott made a speech to the effect that all the governments represented at the G-20 wanted to do something about climate change. It hardly seemed plausible given the degree of resistance mounted and shown by the same government, during the lead up to the G-20 meeting. It sure was hard not to talk about something all these guests anted to talk about it.

I guess that's the nature of summit meets. The host nation doesn't really get to control the agenda if it isn't a nuclear superpower. Tony Abbott made Australia look like an adolescent who is in denial about having to do chores, on the international stage. I'm sure the world took notice. Now that China and America have decided to do something about climate change, then it also activated Clive Palmer and the PUP's agenda of keeping an ETS. Greg Hunt might think they've mothballed the thing but it might comeback from the dead sooner than people thought. After all, the problem with Direct Action is that it is not scaleable in the same way as the ETS. The more there is to cleanup, the better it would be to simply ramp up the ETS again, and be done with it.

No Cuts To Adelaide ABC? Then Don't Make Stupid Cuts

Chris Pyne, he of the Coalition Government that came to power promising not to make any cuts to the ABC and SBS but promptly started cutting as soon as they got in, started a Chang.Org petition to stop the ABC cutting the Adelaide production facility.
Let us now count the shades of stupid in this petition and petitioner.

1. He's a freaking minister of government. He's a lot closer the to the decision making than public petitioners and their petitions. 
2. He is a freaking minister of a government that is cutting $254million to the ABC budget.
3. He is a freaking minister of a government that is cutting that $254million in the face of the ABC asking them not to make such cuts.
4. The alarming hypocrisy of a minister of a government making largely gratuitous, political cuts, on alleged economic grounds (whether true or not) can't complain about such cuts affecting their electorate. 
5. Since when does Chris Pyne care about the ABC's production capacity anywhere? If he's going to start caring about that, maybe he should be looking into the plight of the Film & TV industries a lot more carefully?

Naturally we are underwhelmed. It would be a great shame if the Adelaide unit had to close because of the cuts. It would be a shame if any production facility had to close because of the cuts, because that's the very zero-sum game this government set up. You sort of wonder if these people have any actual brains.

Hooray For Jacqui Lambie (Can't Believe I Just Typed That)

Jacqui Lambie has been going rogue for a few weeks now, over the conditions of defence personnel and something to do with their Christmas bonuses. It has gotten to the point where to refuses to pass anything of the government unless they do as she says, which is to say, she's holding the government to ransom, all on her own-some. The early net effect of this ornery statesman-ship is that the ALP has corralled her into stiffing the Coalition's plans to water down the Future of Finance Advice changes.

This is no ordinary stiffing; this is being described as a "body blow" by the SMH, but more accurately, it's the moment when it has become untenable for the Coalition Government. To date, the Coalition Government has managed to get some of their idiotic plank of policy through the Senate thanks to Clive Palmer making deals with them. Only a couple weeks ago it looks like Palmer was the idiot in letting the Direct (In)Action policy through in time for the Brisbane G-20 summit. Yet now, the rogue PUP Senator is undoing done deals.

If it's bad enough that Joe Hockey's government hasn't been able to pass its awful-awful-awful budget, six months hence from its big debut, then the PUP disintegration ought to give them pause. This might be the moment where it forces the Coalition (the No-alition) to properly think about a Double Dissolution, because they ain't getting it done now. The earliest opportunity to vote out these drongos would be most welcome.

Give The New Guys A Chance

Surprise! Not Your Villain du Jour

Ricky Muir - he of the Roo-Poo flinging Youtube videos and much media ridicule - entered Parliament House as a new Senator this week. By 10:30am this morning he had made news, first by not letting the Abbott Government have its way by steam-rolling the Carbon tax repeal. In a surprise move, Muir broke ranks with the Palmer United to defeat the government's motion to force a vote on the the Carbon Price repeal. After lunch, he sided with Palmer United and voted to preserve ARENA, which, surprised most onlookers.

Maybe Mr. Muir was going to surprise everybody any way. The way he had been portrayed by the media made him look like a dimwit yokel, but I felt at the time it was a beat up. By hook or crook, we in the electorate seem to have managed to send a totally ordinary citizen into the Senate. If our chief complaint is professionalised politicians, then surely we have to leave some ground open for rank outsiders to come in and have a look for themselves. While Mr. Muir didn't look promising going in, partly because of the immense vagueness of his party's platform, this week so far shows that he may yet turn out to be a reasonable, centrist man to have in the senate to balance views. So far his two major contributions don't seem to be those of an ideological extremist or a radicalised desperado.

The other surprising tidbit that emerged during the week was how Glenn Lazarus - aka The Brick with Eyes - was instrumental in bringing Clive Palmer to the middle of the debate so that the emissions target would be kept. This was remarkable in as much as it showed the Palmer United Party is not Clive Palmer's puppet show, and that in turn he was somebody who was going to be persuaded by his new senators.

Again, it's hard to imagine just what would bring a retired Rugby League great into politics in this way - especially after Mal Meninga made a famously bad attempt at it - but it is clearly evident we can't be dismissing him on the basis of his previous career or his current party affiliation. The fact of the matter is we don't know much about the policy position of the Palmer United Party simply because the party is so new and everything seems to be made up on the fly. They can conjure Al Gore from a hat, so who are we to judge what they can accomplish? The PUP Senators represent an open end, rather than a closed, conservative alternative.

The silver lining on the generally angry black storm cloud that is the Abbott Government is that the Senate is so fractured that it's just going to have to fight out every policy morsel on its merits. This means that it can't bundle together things hoping for a horse trade. This Senate is fractious enough already that if anything it's going to be more parsing and demanding than previous Senates. This means that while the Carbon Pricing will likely be repealed, it is going to get replaced with an ETS of some description - even if it is priced to zero until certain conditions are met. It's quite the circus, but the point is that the Abbott government will find out just how little an endorsement it got from the electorate for it to be able to claim any kind of mandate. Our hopes actually rest with Ricky Muir and Glenn Lazarus being centrist, reasonable people. It's a far cry from the Democrats but they may well turn out to be more credible and laudable in the history books than Meg Lees and Natasha Stott-Despoja.

News That's Fit To Punt - 10/Dec/2013

I've had an abominamble month with computers and mobile phones and cars. Retired is my trusty 2009 Quadcore Mac Tower, replaced by a Mac Mini that runs 50% faster and is much more quiet. While it was inevitable, and the Mac Mini is a place-holder until I sort myself out for the new Mac Pro, the phone thing and the transferring data and account thing and the car thing has made it nearly impossible to blog.

So... I'm back. And I don't have a whole lot to say except nyah-nyah to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Their Bed Of Roses

One of the weirder spectacles of the last federal election of course was the endorsement handed out to Tony Abbot by the Fairfax group (excepting the Age in Melbourne who rightly saw the NBN as the deal breaker), led by the Sydney Morning Herald. It was as if the editor of the paper hadn't bothered reading their own paper and proceeded to hand undeserved accolades to Tony Abbott on the grounds of stability. Well, we know how that went, and in less than 100days since taking office Tony Abbott and his Coalition government has squandered its electoral goodwill, and not for once has the editor of the SMH complained about his government's performance.

In that light the joy that keeps giving is the sight of the SMH editorial that lambasts the Abbott Government for their shortfalls, pitfalls and pratfalls.

The Herald believes Abbott has a mandate to scrap the tax but doing so will have virtually no impact on Australia's economic future and leave it with an untested alternative. It is a symptom of a larger problem.

Abbott was a successful opposition leader, adept at knocking down but not rebuilding; criticising but not explaining. Now he is struggling to find - let alone create - a core vision for the nation beyond dispensing with Labor's legacy.

Making matters worse, Abbott's strategy before the election was to defuse contentious policy challenges by promising them away or pledging to seek a mandate first.

I don't know about you, but I have to tell you it's quite unseemly that the editor of the SMH has to write an editorial like this, having vigorously endorsed the said purpose-less Prime Minister on the way in. The truth of it, as it was on election day and before, Tony Abbott was always going to bring in a duplicitous, mendacious, largely ideological, backward looking pack of cultural dinosaurs into office. To that end he exercised immense duplicity, mendacity, ideological gobbledegook, and retrograde sloganeering to get into office. All of us with any power of observation (and reading - for we learned this from news sites) could have told the editor this was the case, and this load of duplicity, mendacity, ideological obtuseness and obscurantist fascism would not translate well into being a fit and proper government. If there is any thing to be gleaned from all this, I will say this: that this Abbott government will one day be thrown out with equal parts bad faith and bad science, and their names destroyed by this duplicity, mendacity and fascism. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people, all of the time. And fool you once, shame on them, but fool you twice... you probably voted for John Howard in '98.

It's only been 3months but it's already getting old beating up on the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who *foolishly* - yes ever so retarded-ly - backed Tony Abbott on election day. Yes, you sir, remain a fool.

Speaking Of Which, That NBN Thingy!

In case you missed it, the NBN is going to be able to deliver world class speed of up to 1GBps by the end of this year. We're talking 3 weeks.

Australians linked to the national broadband network will be able to get world-leading internet download speeds of one gigabit per second by the end of this year, the company building the network will announce on Friday.

While some countries such as Japan are moving even further ahead with 2Gbps connections, Australia's coming 1Gbps capability is the same speed as Google's cutting edge fibre network in several US cities.

An entire movie could be pulled down in several seconds using the service, which is about 100 times faster than the average speeds offered by ADSL connections. But most people would not see the true benefit of 1Gbps for another 10 years, when households would have multiple rooms streaming super high definition video from the internet, according to Professor Rod Tucker, director of the institute for a broadband-enabled society at the University of Melbourne.

"The average person who does regular internet activities is probably not going to notice much difference today,'' Professor Tucker said. ''Where I think it will make a difference is in small businesses.''

Independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said right now only about 5 per cent of people, mainly small businesses, would be able to make use of the increased speed.

The wholesale price for the 1Gbps service will be $150 a month, though retailers will add a margin to this. NBN Co will also launch two other high speed services - 250Mbps and 500 Mbps - by December.

The scary thing is that Coalition Government still want to hobble this great infrastructure project because it's allegedly a waste. The single biggest beneficiaries will be the tech sector followed by other assorted small businesses, but no, Tony Abbott wants to slow this down and saddle it with the truly pathetic Telstra copper network.

Telstra has never revealed how much it spends maintaining the network each year and its own descriptions of the life span range from three to 100 years.

The state of the customer access network, as it is known, directly affects the cost and speed of implementing the proposed fibre-to-the-node network because unusable sections of copper must be repaired or replaced with fibre.

Fault rates have increased in the past seven years from about 13 per cent in 2006-07 to 18 per cent, or 1 million faults, in 2011-12, according to figures published by the communications regulator.

However, a spokesman for the expected incoming communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said copper maintenance costs were not cited by any telco in the world as a reason to replace wires with a full fibre network, and the most common cause of faults was accidental digging through phone lines.

''In areas where the [network] is deployed using fibre to the node, the most error-prone parts of the copper - the large bundles running between nodes and exchanges - will be replaced by fibre,'' he said.

Which does not really give you a whole lot of encouragement about where the Coalition sees this as going. It's like we have a government that is hell bent on fucking up the most important infrastructure project going. Of course this bunch want to be known as Infrastructure mavens but they mean concrete-pouring for more roads. It's worse than pathetic, it's totally misguided.

Whither Double Dissolution?

Pleiades sent in this interesting entry. Actually he's been sending me lots of interesting things but this one is probably most relevant.

So why is this all a problem for Tony Abbott?

Today’s Newspoll, published in The Australian, shows a rapid cooling of the relationship between voters and the Coalition government. Newspoll shows that based on 2013 preference flows (in the House of Representatives), an election today would return a Bill Shorten Labor government, 52 per cent to 48 per cent in two-party-preferred terms.

Most commentators believe the Tony Abbott/Christopher Pyne mishandling of the Gonski reforms is to blame, but the flare-ups with Indonesia and China can’t have helped.

There is also a strong whiff of cooked-books coming from Treasurer Hockey’s office – the $8.8 billion he shovelled into the Reserve Bank of Australia’s capital reserves was widely criticised as a way to blow out the budget now, to look good later.

So if a Western Australian election is held before the new Senate sits on July 1, there could be some very large swings, and major re-routing of preferences.

That translates into a scenario where the Carbon Tax repeal gets rejected before the new Senate comes in; followed by a new election for the Senate in WA, resulting in another Senate that the Coalition does not control; which would knock out the Carbon Tax repeal and give Tony Abbott his card for a double dissolution except it's likely Abbott's electoral support would be less than ideal to contest an election. At that point it would be a choice between going to the polls to try and get that mandate or giving up on the biggest thing they promised when they went in.

Goes to show that the brand of crash-or-crash-through brand of politics deployed by Abbott has the interesting side effect that it destroys the institutional support that might have come to you had you not behaved like a bull in a china shop. Life is, if nothing else, interesting.

Unrepresentative Swill

While I'm On A Roll Ranting About The Coalition Government...

Here's something interesting.

She's offered it only within the confines of the government, but word is Peta Credlin has some world-weary advice for rookie Labor leader Bill Shorten: if you're serious about making Labor competitive again in 2016, you best swallow hard, take a deep breath, and turn your back on carbon pricing. And you best do it now.

It's that simple. Or is it?

That Credlin is Tony Abbott's chief of staff, is enough to provoke suspicion. Indeed, coming from the respected but highly partisan Credlin, such unsolicited advice is just as likely to make the ALP cling ever more determinedly to its carbon pricing commitments like the proverbial … to a blanket.
But some in Labor are beginning to question the longer-term implications of an automatic assumption of staying the course. Ever so quietly, they are whispering ''hold on, let's just think about this''.

One of those is thought to be Shorten himself - the man Abbott described this week as ''nothing if not pragmatic''.

Abbott's super-focused Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, agrees the term ''pragmatic'' was a coded appeal to Shorten's personal exceptionalism - his sense that, more so than his colleagues, he is a realist and will do the political maths pretty dispassionately when needed.

Credlin, of course, knows first hand about the wilderness Shorten has just entered.
As an adviser in the Howard government and then as chief of staff to a succession of leaders - Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, and finally Abbott - she has seen her share of political failure.

Just for the record, Peta Credlin isn't anywhere near being an elected representative of Australia's constituency. Yet there she is offering unsolicited advice to the new Opposition Leader in the most patronising of ways. But basically she's saying, roll over and play dead or you won't have any shot at winning government. And she says this from her authority of having been chief of staff to Nelson, Turnbull, and Abbott - but hey is that a position you get voted in. Uh, didn't think so.

It says she thinks the Coalition won government on its policy platform when in all likelihood the electorate rejected the riven and fractured ALP government. What's worse is that the ALP allowed it self to be so riven and fractured just by having Tony Abbott saying a bunch of ridiculous things over and over again. But the main point is, if Peta Credlin thinks they won on the back of policies, she is so wrong it's not funny. But this is a good thing because it means they're willing to go to a Double Dissolution, because they really believe in their own bullshit. This is going to be really interesting if it gets to that point.

The Honorable Clive Palmer, Mouthbreather Patrician

It's really difficult to watch Clive Palmer giving speeches because he's such a mouth breather. He sounds like his nose is perpetually blocked, and you start to feel like you're running out of breath, just listening to him.

Anyway, Clive is saying he won't pass anything until he and his ragtag bunch of Climate Change Deniers gets treated like a major party. I guess he doesn't have a problem being described as 'entitled'. He's playing brinkmanship with Tony Abbott knowing full well Tony Abbott needs the balancing block to repeal the "Carbon tax". What's even stranger is that he wants to be reimbursed the Carbon tax already paid by his company. Otherwise, Abbott won't get to repeal the Carbon Tax after his Senators take up their positions in the Senate after June next year.

Now, I don't know about you but this strikes me as a massive conflict of interest. You never saw the Australian democrats make this kind of demand when they had the balance of power - not in the most fey and feckless moments of Cheryl Kernot, or the closet-Liberal moments of Meg Lees, or for that matter the petulant and idiotic moments of Natasha the Stoat-Destrpoyer. Not even Bob Brown made demands like that. Cheryl or Meg or Natasha or Bob never said "I won't pass this legislation unless I get a tax refund on a previously-legitimate tax that I paid."

How is this not a massive conflict of interest? Forget for the moment Clive is saying he's effectively going to block Tony Abbot from governing unless he gets what he wants which is Tea-bagging enough. Forget all those weird-ass expenses MPs have been racking up at the tax payers expense. Clive won't say yes to anything unless he gets a refund for the Carbon Tax.  He wants a freaking ransom!

Paul Keating was sure right about the Senate being unrepresentative swill. I sure as hell can't believe how Australia saddled itself with such a crazy Senate.