Dawn at Chioggia
It’s election day in Australia on Saturday and Cate and I will be toddling along to the Australian Embassy in Wien on Friday to do our bit. Not that it matters much.
Labor totally cocked up the opportunity just as Obama has done in the USA.
They squandered the opportunity to do what they should have done and instead we had the Ruddster postulating, prevaricating, pontificating, dithering and gallivanting until he was put out of his misery by the entirely necessary coup.
Ms Gillard may scrape across the line but it will be despite the Labor Party’s grotesque efforts to commit hara-kiri in full view of the Australian public - without even a PG warning.
Even that well known tosser Mark Latham (a former leader of the party - spare me!) has weighed in - suggesting that voters should lodge a blank vote in protest. This would be a match with his blank but very boofy head.
It takes great courage and commitment to continue to vote for a party comprised almost solely of Plonkers, Knuckleheads, Steaming Nits and Boofheads but I would disembowel myself in the woods with a stick before I would vote for that bible bashing, tub thumping misogynist Cardinal Abbott.
I suspect that no matter who wins government not much will happen unless it has the support of the Greens because they are likely to have the balance of power in the Senate.
This may not be a bad thing. Bob Brown is barking mad but his heart is in the right place and at least he does believe in climate change.
One of the things I really like about Bob Brown is that Cardinal George Pell - that well known Catholic Church homophobe, misogynist and bigot - hates Bob and the Greens (Well - Bob is gay and you know what the Catholics thinks about gays).
And incidentally - from yesterday’s SMH
“Tony Abbott has restated his skeptical views on climate change, and suggested the world may be getting cooler, as the Australian Academy of Science released a new report warning of the future impact of global warming.
The Opposition Leader said he accepted ''that climate change is real'', but he did not back away from his view, based in part on the work of the Australian climate sceptic Ian Plimer, that the world is getting colder.”
The man who could be Prime Minister takes the world of a single climate change denier over the work - for decades - of many thousands of scientists who have all reached the same conclusion and produce new evidence every year - including that the last decade was the hottest EVER.
But I am of the view now that the planet is FUBAR and cannot be rescued no matter what we do - so climate change does not worry me much any more. I imagine the last remaining living creatures will be asphyxiated in about 100 years. The only creatures left alive will be cockroaches and a few particularly hardy Republicans living in the Catskills.
But one thing does really bother me.
The Labor party is in the process of installing a National Broadband Network which will be fibre optic and will provide download speeds of up to 100 mbps. This plan will cost $43 Billion. This would be the best investment Australia has ever made.
The Coalition thinks that this is too much money and instead plans to spend $6 Billion on a cobbled together system using existing copper and new wireless networks - that guarantees minimum speeds up 12 mbps.
The Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbot was asked if he knew what a speed of 12 mbps meant or if he knew how many towers would have to be built to provide the network.
The Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbot was asked if he knew what a speed of 12 mbps meant or if he knew how many towers would have to be built to provide the network.
He did not know the answers and said
''I'm no Bill Gates here and I don't claim to be any kind of tech head,''
Holy Guacamole! Not ‘a tech head’ is somewhat of an understatement.
If Australia has a network providing a maximum 12 mbps with wireless it will be (apart from Burma, Burkina Faso, the Faroe Islands and Afghanistan) the slowest Internet service in the world.
It will also have the largest number of towers in the known world.
The wireless network will require many thousands of towers and as it is now impossible to build a tower anywhere without people marching in the streets to stop these diabolical monstrosities from making their children's heads explode - it may take a long time.
The Coalition - which is well known for its Troglodytian behavior thinks that the Internet is used solely for email and the few Members of Parliament who have personal computers probably still have dial-up connections at home.
I wish they could be like their British counterparts and use the Internet to download pornography. Then they would see how important high speed broadband really is.
Now I don’t know if the people who make this type of policy are morally or intellectually bankrupt - or both. But if they do what they propose to do it will make Australia a third world nation in terms of Internet technology and this will have a monstrously adverse impact on science, medicine, communications and technology for many years to come.
There is simply no comprehension by the Trogs of where the Internet is going, the developments that are likely to take place and the uses to which technology will be put in the future. All these will depend upon capacity, spectrum and speed of delivery.
Of course high speed Internet will always be available to those who can afford to pay for it - but what we need for the future is universal access to high speed internet at an affordable price.
Of course high speed Internet will always be available to those who can afford to pay for it - but what we need for the future is universal access to high speed internet at an affordable price.
However, I suspect that if the Coalition does win office they will do nothing at all about Broadband because after the election they will say one or all of the following.
We have discovered after taking office - to our great horror and distress - that the waste and profligacy in the previous government has left us with such an unspeakably bad deficit (sob) that we are unable - unfortunately - to fulfill any of our pre-election promises. (A small amount has been rescued from the ashes to refurbish the Prime Minister's office and increase the postage allowance for Members of Parliament).
We have discovered after taking office - to our great horror and distress - that the waste and profligacy in the previous government has left us with such an unspeakably bad deficit (sob) that we are unable - unfortunately - to fulfill any of our pre-election promises. (A small amount has been rescued from the ashes to refurbish the Prime Minister's office and increase the postage allowance for Members of Parliament).
Revised costings have indicated that the true cost of providing the wireless network is actually $500 Billion. (Factors intrude which were unknown to us at the time of the election).
There are technological problems. We are working on these and do not expect to solve them until approximately one week before the next election - at which time we will re-announce the policy (Or any other one that will help us get elected again)
There is not a single community in Australia that will allow a tower to be built within 100 kilometers of where they are. (We could put one small tower on Nauru but that won’t help much).
Telstra has been doing an excellent job providing excruciatingly slow and eye-wateringly expensive Internet services to the community for some time and we would like them to continue to screw you blind. (Why? - because we hate you for voting against us last time).
And as far as the outcome of the election is concerned I intend to be refined, restrained, circumspect and judicious in any post-election comments if the Trogs triumph. Just like the sign says.
