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?

Hang on Tristan, "Here, time is of the essence. Australia could well become a world leader in new communications, information, and entertainment industries." This is borrowed (or stolen) from the AGW industry where the claim is Australia is going to become a world leader in renewable technologies.

Jeez we'll be busy leading the world, and I'll bet everyone out there in the world is just waiting for Australia to show them the way, like we are with renewable energy .. what, we're not, oh but I thought, never mind./sarc

It sounds like it will take as long to do as the Snowy River project, and by then the world will have passed us by.

Governments should get out of the way, stop mandating what should be done, and simply make it easier for companies to do things, like reduce taxes, free up the industrial relations system, allow companies to use $ they might pay in tax for R&D (there is an R&D scheme but you need around $1M a year for the accounting to actually use the government's convoluted system)

We can't expect to pay as little as Europe or the US do for boradband, they have larger markets, if we want it we have to pay more, fine, I'm happy to pay more - my worry is with this government they never do anything beyond talking and while they are, nothing happens. Again, get out of the way!

How did Rudd get to believe overnight that he could turn into a Major Service Supply Industry ? Govt. has never been any good at any service delivery , Trains passenger and Goods , the old PMG , Water , Education , Roads & Electricity .
Eight years ETA , a lot will happen in that time ! It will most likely be obsolete in 5 yrs look at MOB tech .

Rudd and his mad mate should hop back into their square before they get to look like right royal galoots .

Jefferson - just to be clear - I am a socialist, a liberal and an internationalist. Ia abhor violent militarism; and I believe class struggle is one of the most important 'engines' which has driven progressive change

Tony Blair is a Fabian, so's this guy. Violent "interventions", "regime changes", and now, "religious wars" are part of the deal with such pompous imperialists (try a search on 'tony blair" and 'chicago council', for example). Just don't call it "militarism" - that would mean "fascist"!

The advertised "infrastructure" scheme is simply an effort to prevent the bandwidth choke promised by the totalitarian Canberra-centred web-filtering push. The entire process is vastly bigger than anything the Stasi could even dream about.

Fascists all, in effect. No wonder the out-of-touch article evoked typically out-of-touch, but compatible, neolib fantasies about "no tax", "leave the state out", etc. They're having a non-debate, because both sides here essentially agree to the same monetarist fiction under its financiers' "free trade" regime.

News break clowns: USD 14.5 Trillion of derivatives debt is being fed continuously via the combined lunacy of the state's monetarists and their bosses and school chums in the finance sector (and, of course, in the bogus, lying "opposition" lib/nats). The bail-out pork is spreading endlessly towards a hyperinflationary Weimar repeat on a global scale. In other words, a lead-up to fascism.

Now, just who do these Fabians really work for?

Mil-observer - if you want to know what I believe re: war - read some of the material I wrote for Arena Magazine on the Iraq conflict. I hope what you say is some kind of 'joke' - but I don't find those kind of accusations very funny. BTW - militarism might be a necessary precondition of fascism - but it is not a sufficient condition. Maybe I should just ignore this - I don't know.

And of course - neo-liberal authoritarianism and militarism may not in themselves by fascist - but they are no less undesirable.

With the net filtering, the Rudd gov is the most authoratarian so far.

OK Tristan. Relax that defensive reflex for a moment: I'll accept at face value your apparent anti-war sentiment. Nonetheless, I suspect that you have not thought through the imperialistic, warlike and fascistic implications of certain underlying ideological assumptions in your belief system, let alone the obvious compromises from your association with "liberalism" and organizations like the British Fabian Society.

I'm identifying the fascistic tendencies and actions of influential people with whom you associate. Granted, you are probably not a direct acquaintance of war criminal and serial sophist-liar Blair; maybe you have never even communicated or met with him. But his authority and influence as a Fabian are quite self-evident, as was his pivotal initiative in pushing the Big Lies on Iraq. Indeed, he's still at it, as if if nothing similar happened in the dark history of fascism; that's why I alluded to the "Chicago School" where Blair recently pontificated yet again on his pet, even obsessive, doctrine of modern imperialist aggression.

But consider the clear parallels in the overarching political crimes at those most important and definitive international levels of war and diplomacy. A self-identified "fascist" state sought to dominate and subjugate its neighbors to the east, namely Czechoslovakia and Poland. The pretext in the first case was "human rights abuses" and "discrimination" against an "oppressed minority" i.e., the Sudeten Germans. In the second case it was a simple intelligence fit-up using corpses dressed as German soldiers, claiming they'd been murdered by Polish troops in a cross-border raid.

On Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan, Burma, etc., such claims surround interventionist aggression and coercion by neo-lib snakes like Fabian Blair, and his accomplices (labelled "neo-con" - big deal!) Cheney and Bush. Servile bit player-accomplices Howard and Downer were just "lib-con artists".

These guys lack the honesty to wear jodhpurs and Sam Browne belts. But such fashion statements are irrelevant to the actual motives, intentions and results of their actions. Just as the fashion statements of a profoundly corrupted parliamentary and congressional democracy are irrelevant when considering the fundamental consensus these main parties express in their imperialistic and fascistic aggression, arrogance and criminality.

If anyone wants to know what my position is on Fabianism you're welcome to read the article from the URL below.

The Fabians both in Australia and Britain are a broad and diverse lot. As for me - I believe AFS is an important site of cultural and counter-hegemomic struggle.

see:

http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/09/14/the-end-of-fabian-socialism-in-australia/

Yeah, well I got offered to join them. The offer was from an insufferable middle-class snob, but there you go. Ah, but if I'd taken the bait and jumped through the hoops: study opportunities, publishing access, even jobs, would magically appear! Just don't call it corruption, eh?

So you just back that latest scam from and for another Canberra rort?

And how wonderfully diverse! A leading privatizer and war criminal helping to "counter-hegemonize" too...Puke central.

Mil-Observer;

Yes there's corruption everywhere. But I've never had any personal experience with it in regards to the Fabian Society.

My own philosophy is to avoid compromise; to always be honest with regard to my political beliefs; to work towards a genuinely participatory democracy - including a strongly liberal education.

(If you want to know what I mean by this, check out my paper in Fabian Essays 2004)

Since 2004 I actually haven't had much opportunity to write for Fabian publications... (I have tried) Don't know why - but personally I have tried to stand up for a a more resolutely socialist stance.

There are many publications who have repeatedly knocked me back over the past three years - or have not even responded to my enquiries... Because of this, I deeply appreciate the opportunity OLO gives me to be heard.

Finally - the Fabian Society is of great strategic importance... Buy this I mean it is a potential means of encouraging cross-factional exchange - and of encouraging a democratic socialist perspective on a cross-factional basis...

"Corruption everywhere"? Was that meant to reassure? Anyway, you can rule out my small patches of turf in that assessment, for starters!

I really don't presume to have any idea about your own prospects via the London-based international network of Fabian luvvies. I alluded merely to the corrupt machinations as presented through their clear offers to me - including an offer of smooth, well-paid re-entry into cushy bureaucracies from which I was formally blacklisted! Yep, the power of grubby money...

In the long-prevailing conditions of institutional corruption, getting published seems more like a matter of vanity. If a writer/commentator poses any significant challenge to the established gangster networks, then going public simply means getting vilified and defamed under an avalanche of outrageous lies. Better off sticking to samizdat.

In that sense, notice how my comments on Fabian Blair were not in any substantial way controversial. But your own self even seems to embrace the likes of Blair on the grounds of Fabians being "a broad and diverse lot". That echoes the words of Blair friend, admirer and accomplice J Winston Howard, referring to the Liberal Party as "a broad church". Apart from Howard's filthy inheritances from PNG-based copra plantations, his father was a fully committed member of the fascist "New Guard" - part of a network of fascist militias funded by powerful bankers by the 1930s. These are simple facts too, however much the establishment powers try to sweep them out of sight.

Again, I'm not making wild-@55ed allegations here to try discrediting Blair, Howard, etc., but statements of simple historical fact.

Therefore, you are severely compromised: you say that your "own philosophy is to avoid compromise", but the horse has bolted, as it were. Your passionate (and admirable) idealism is exploited by the establishment in order to lend their networks a veneer of credibility, popular legitimacy and openness. Perhaps worse still, such compromise can easily distract and distort the perspectives and priorities of thinking people like ourselves. That has dangerous implications for any writer.

Of course they're not about to give you any serious voice within that system.