Tristan, what part of human life do you think government does *not* have a natural monopoly over? Hmm, lemme see, government has a right to control all trade, all industry, all commerce, all employment, the economics of retirement, of health, of anything to do with 'the environment'...

It would probably be easier to list the few areas of human freedom that your slave philosophy leaves over. What are they?

Year, a natural born wealth sink. If they can achieve the same level of feather bedded over manning that they did, when the PMG controlled the phone system, they should manage a half a million under employed "jobs", & we can all pay 5 times too much for the net.

They can probably call them green jobs, too. They'll certainly be comming the raw [green] prawn, when the "workers" claim to have done any.

When these airy fairy dreamers realise, that for them to skim a living of the work of others, someone has to do some? When everyone "works" for the government you get the result we saw in Russia, & the one China was heading for, before they changed tack.

A natural public monopoly is defined as an enterprise so large that no industry has the funding to tackle it alone, and the benefit to society as a whole out weighs the cost.

The $43bn plan is too big for any one company, but the $15bn node based plan was not. The other reason for the reluctance of the private sector to get involved is that labor expects them to install the network and then share it at low cost with their competitors.

Finally, the benefit to the average household cannot yet be matched to the cost. Would Joe Bloggs's life be much improved with 100Mb instead of 10Mb of download speed?

This is from the same twit that is trying to bring you net filtering and speeds lower than dial up.

Puleez

Dear Shadow Minister/readers,

regardless of the size of the project - were it a private monopoly, ultimately it would have a captive market. Public monopoly - accountable through the democratic process - is always preferable to private monopoly. And part-private monopoly has the same pitfalls as full private monopoly. The project is too big - and too important - to get wrong. That's why it's important we invest now with the best technology at hand - with the intent of providing for industries - in communications, information and entertainment - for decades into the future.
Furthermore - as we slide into recession - the time is ripe for such infrastructure projects... To build for the future - yes - but also to provide jobs in the here and now.

Tristan

And this, presumably explains away, our need to tax the wind and the rain…

People don't want to pay for it voluntarily, so they should be forced to fund it under compulsion?

And who is this 'society as a whole'? The whole global human population? No? You define it to exclude all human beings outside of Australia do you? Ohhh I get it ... national socialism. According to this theory, we simply assume that the wealth that is to be confiscated for this project had no higher purpose in the hands of its owners. But we already know that they valued their plans for it better than yours, otherwise you wouldn't have to threaten them with being imprisoned or even raped in order to force them to submit to you taking it, would you?

This is the same socialist who then has the gall to complain that people in the world are going hungry. I wonder what might be happening to the capital that might otherwise go to supplying them with food at a profit? Oh yes, confiscated by the socialists to pay for their belief that basic human rights justifying the use of coercion now include a high-speed broadband connection.

Tristan, don't evade the question: what parts of human life do you think are not subject to a natural monopoly power in government to control?