How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely not anywhere near as important as roads and mines and coal.
It's an absolute tragedy for the nation that the original plan was changed by such ignorant luddites as Tony Abbott.
They made such an incredibly huge fuss about the cost, but only a month or two back they handed a $23 billion corporate tax cut over to companies and it barely made the newspaper.
I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I have not an atom of respect for any of our politicians.
Off topic, to me all part of the same story is my absolute quivering rage that we are literally giving away our natural resources for nothing or close to nothing whilst every litre of natural gas that can be sucked out of the ground is shipped to other countries.
Meanwhile the politicians ride around in helicopters, leech the taxpayer blind with their kingly entitlements and are genuinely surprised when there is outrage about it.
Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots.
* A robust FTTP that would be paid back nicely, and
* A carbon tax that would now be an "emissions trading scheme" doing it's part to reduce carbon emissions.
Truly Kevin Rudd can be credited with remarkable vision for proposing the NBN in the form that he did and it is a great pity it did not come to conclusion.
Labor/Rudd/Gillard/all the shadowy Labor background figures gets the blame for the "true" NBN not happening because they just could help themselves fighting and grasping at the crown.
I mean, ultimately I voted for the Pirate Party, but you can't blame people for not having faith that Labor would achieve in their third term something they'd fail to achieve in the previous two. Keeping someone in power despite not fulfilling their promises is how you get Howard.
It's also worth noting that Labor was slow rolling out the NBN. They did have 6 years in power, and didn't get NBN in the hands of many people at all.
Yes it was a big project, but it's hard to argue that more speed was impossible.
The biggest problem was not going fibre to the pit. It would have saved one of the most expensive parts of the operation - the lead in to the house.
Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.
The UK, Canada, NZ etc. and otger countries (to a weaker extent) have similar laws. It is ridiculous in my view.
https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display...
One of the more worrying issues is that the Governor-General (and thus by proxy the Queen of fucking England) has vito power over our laws.
Also, its veto, not vito and the Governor General's reserve powers are a check on the Government. In the history of the Commonwealth of Australia these powers have been used twice: 1) On 13 May 1932, when the Governor of New South Wales Sir Philip Game dismissed the Government of New South Wales. 2) On 11 November 1975, when the Governor-General of Australia Sir John Kerr dismissed the Commonwealth Government.
In both cases an election was held very soon afterwards and, again in both cases, the dismissed government was massively defeated by popular vote.
I really wish they would teach better civics in schools.
We don't have any legal (let alone constitutional) right to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and a few other freedoms that are present in the US bill of rights. There are some laws that provide protections for certain kinds of political speech, but those are incredibly narrow compared to the First Amendment in the US. In fact the only people in Australia who have freedom of speech (even surpassing the US because libel laws don't apply to them) is politicians in the House of Reps and Senate -- ordinary citizens don't have those freedoms.
> I really wish they would teach better civics in schools.
To be frank we have more serious issues in our school system.
In Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v the Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106, the majority of the High Court held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an incident of the system of representative government established by the Constitution. This was reaffirmed in Unions NSW v New South Wales [2013] HCA 58.
This right is limited by certain laws a.k.a Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Then of course, there's the fact that Australia is a British dependency. This needs to go. Australia is not a sovereign state - it is a colonial property. Yes, even still today.
The Constitution also doesn't protect the Australian Parliament as a democratic institution. It doesn't address, nor protect, the Australian environment. Equality: not guaranteed, at all, by the Constitution.
There are just so many things wrong with it.
Couldn't agree more. I've yet to meet a single fellow Aussie that has anything but disdain for politicians from any party. Labor, Liberal, Greens, One Nation doesn't seem to matter, they're all a pack of self serving con artists, and unless the major political parties take a serious look at themselves over the next few years, this is exactly what they're going to be dealing with. Especially as Millennials take their first steps into adulthood in a country that does nothing but tread on them and dismiss them as nothing but avocado loving morons that don't know how to make it in "the real world".
He's been bad enough in the UK, but it seems like he has even more control in Australia.
He started out here, no surprise that his stuff dominates.
(I am not saying "oh it's not the fault of the politicians, it's the fault of the populace" -- see my opening sentence that I think there's a lot of contributing factors. And each of these can go several layers deep).
Young People * Housing Affordability * Uni Fees * Centrelink * Employment * Climate change
Middle Aged People * Super * Eduction * Health * Taxation * Infrastructure
Old People * Pension * Health
The default method of measuring consumer surplus is measuring (using econometric black magic) the difference between how much people would be willing to pay for something and how much they actually paid. IE, if you would have paid $17 (but not $18) for a burger but it only cost $12, you accumulated $5 of surplus. By this measure, the internet (home usage) is not very valuable. If prices of (eg your mobile data plan) go up by $15, many people would pass. That implies the user surplus (for those people) is less than $15. Overall, the traditional economics analysis of personal internet access looks similar to cable TV or other "frivolous discretionary spend."
I don't really think you can sum up the internet in this way. The broader cultural impacts of internet access seem far more interesting than cable TV, to me.
I hate Abbott as much as anyone but Turnbull seems like the real problem.
However they didn't argue this.
They stuck with the concept of a nationally funded broadband network, but one which was sub-par on almost every metric except cost. This just doesn't make any sense to me, especially because they tried to sell it to the public by suggesting that things like "Why invest so much in fibre when it may be surpassed by another technology in the near future". There was also a lot of clever wording around how their version would be "delivered cheaper, faster, etc than the alternative" - I have no doubt these words were chosen because it sounds like the data rates themselves would be faster, whereas they actually meant it the build could be completed faster.
I understand the need to support rural areas but the the majority of the initial budget was to cover non-metropolitan areas and while the govt has been messing this up, private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance.
The low population density of Australia makes backhaul and overseas transfer of data more expensive, and the last 2-5% of people might be very expensive to get. But the original goals of the NBN were well thought out and modeled properly.
About 60% of the population is clustered in 4 cities [0] and we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities
[1] https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ & http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-austral...
Hu? You mean how they used copper put in place by telco incumbent Telstra, most of which were built when it was government owned? And how they relied on government mandated access to the copper lines to enable that?
Or are you talking about the small private fibre rollouts? Because they don't cover "huge swaths of the population".
There is no Australian political party with any momentum that is pro-small government. The Liberals just like making themselves and their friends rich, but they don't have any strong ideological backing. Especially considering 90% of Aussies are pretty content with the level of government involvement in stuff that would send shivers down the spines of most yanks.
The founder of one of Australia's largest independent ISP's Internode (and later NBNco board member) Simon Hackett put it very well in 2011 where he showed locking in a arbitrary $20 charge per megabit hobbled the network.The whole profitability revolved around charging more for faster speeds/more data in the future.
Every other technological advance gave users faster for cheaper whereas this network would only work if people paid more. Cut to the future and now you've got competition from 4G cellular data at the low end and private companies providing private fibre/wireless networks at the top end. The whole pyramid is coming crashing down so much that the government has had to introduce a new broadband tax ($7.10 per month) to subsidize it.
And even the tax won't solve the problems because the CVC usage charge still exists and the business case still resolves around charging more in the future. In about 5 years when they realize what a stuff up it's been we can only help they write it all off and we can go back having affordable fast internet like the rest of the world.
https://simonhackett.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/commsday-w-...
https://blog.internode.on.net/2011/07/21/nbn-retail-pricing-...
When you say v6 /56, does that mean you can have 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 addressable hosts? [I don't CIDR gud...]
"Whingepool" have their nickname for a reason ;)
I contacted 15+ people in senior leadership at NBNco, all of whom are still on my LinkedIn. No matter how hard I tried, we couldn't get a meeting with NBNco execs to demo our tech.
I took it to the local tech press here to get some positive coverage and they told us repeatedly how "stupid" we were. We wrote comments on the now PM (then Communications Minister)'s blog and chatted to his people. Zero interest. At that point they'd been at it for ~7 years, spent billions and had pretty much nothing to show for it. Nada.
Last year, an academic completely unaffiliated with us testified at a parliamentary committee into why the existing approach has been such a boondoggle. As a remedy, he suggested our exact approach. He also copped it from the tech press.
Here are a couple tweets from that period between me and an online tech pundit. This Renai LeMay fellow runs Australia's most influential tech site, it's very very popular with Australia's politicians:
https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705523306699423744 https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705528311330385920
Such is the life of the serial entrepreneur. This is the typical bs that we have to put up with. I folded that company up pretty fast. Idea tested. NEXT.
Australia is not a place to live unless you work in health or in a trade. Scientists and engineers (engineering is not even understood in Australia, usually being associated to things like infrastructure or maintenance) are screwed.
If you seriously don't understand why that solution could never have been politically feasible then to be honest it isn't surprising you were ignored.
Additionally, did you really suggest that people should be able to dig their own trenches and plug fibre in themselves? You do realize that does nothing to make you seem credible, right?
As I said in the linked tweet, you could hire the handyman down the street to do it, or you could pay the major contractor Ericsson 100X as much per property to do it. If they somehow screw up plugging something into something else, it just doesn't work - it doesn't affect the integrity of the network at all.
In my opinion, it's the existing approach that lacks credibility. It's corporate welfare. That's why Australia's broadband lags behind Turkey, Poland, Mexico, and many others even though it's a much richer country per capita than all of those.
The funny thing was when we came onto the scene the most interest we got was from Ericsson, with some email discussions and heaps of their people showing up on my profiles, etc. That was flattering but apparently they needn't have worried about us spoiling their cash cow. I can understand their paranoia. Life must be sweet when you own 100% of the purported supply.
It's an absolute disgrace how much it has been butchered. I have thoughts about returning occasionally, but going from 2 GB/s unlimited for Aus$ 40 ish a month, back to those speeds and prices is a major factor for me staying here.
It is a massive quality of life difference to have amazing internet.
When I journey back home and stay with my parents, it is impossible to get work done. Latency is the first killer - it'll never properly be solved if you're working with remote systems in the US or Europe - but then upload speeds slowly rip at your soul. Download speeds and quotas are no picnic either of course.
That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.
I wanted to move back to Australia sooner than later - and the FTTH NBN promised interesting start-up and other opportunities - but given it has been relegated to a copper backwater those plans are on indefinite hold :(
I usually point people to the Australian government debate regarding copper wire over iron wire from 1910 as an anachronistic comparison.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/06/parliament-arguing-about-...
I know the feeling. I'm relatively lucky in that I live somewhere that has had VDSL for some time and my download speed is adequate, if not ideal. But my upload speed is atrocious, in fact actually slower now than it was in past years (before my ISP got bought out by a bigger ISP) and my ISP will not guarantee any particular upload speed for my connection. I make use of a cloud-based backup service to mitigate the possibility of local disk failure and it's just painful.
You hardly hear anyone talking about upload speeds in Australia. It's as if cloud-based services aren't really a thing and we're back in the early 2000s.
> That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.
I know this feeling as well. :) It is a massive lost opportunity that the country will be paying for in more ways than one for decades to come.
I'm actually looking into a new system atm(due for a full upgrade) and am trying to see how I can fully utilise that on my PC.
Edit: typos, fat thumbs again
The whole NBN project just irritates me at how it has been mis-managed, by both of the political parties.
Yes, Labor included since they could have sped things up by having Fibre to the basement for most apartment buildings in the cities, and then upgraded those lines once the other build out had been completed. Also for having the rollout happen along political lines (as has been alleged).
Still most of the blame I assign to the Liberals, since it seems they want to make a shambles out of this for political reasons, and also so they can sell it to some other company in the near future.
Also Polish by birth and wanted an easier way to travel around Europe.
1. All large scale infrastructure rollouts are difficult and subject to problems and blowouts.
2. It was made a political issue. New government decided to make major revamps for no reason other than it was different to the previous government so they could use it as an election issue.
Some of the utter incompetence involved in the actual rollout was astounding.
Telstra's crews had to reinstall the lines under the main road of my town 4 times.
Twice it was installed on the wrong side of the road, and once it was unshielded.
6 months of traffic jams instead of 1 month.
The only positive thing they could tout at the time was pass by numbers which ignores the hardest part of the roll out, connecting fiber to each and every house.
You can argue that the last mile problem should have been tackled head on in the NBN and it was a mistake for the liberals to not, but to say that they did it for "no reason other than it was different to the previous government" is just simply wrong.
According to partisan figures that were often repeated but never justified. I don't doubt it would have blown out, world class infrastructure would have been worth it at twice the cost. Instead we have the current NBN who's costs have blown out just as much to delivery 20th century infrastructure.
I mean if you pretend that the $30~ billion paid to telstra had absolutely nothing to do with the NBN then yea you can avoid the 2x figure but I still have no idea how you can say the two things are completely unrelated.
> Instead we have the current NBN who's costs have blown out just as much to delivery 20th century infrastructure.
How? It's fiber for over 95% the connection with plans already been tested to allow people to complete the line to their house with fiber if your willing to pay for it. That's a lot better than what was available in 20th century.
I don't see the big problem with having the government do the entire backbone and lines close to the houses and allow people to fund the final hop if they want to.
What do you think is more efficient, digging up the footpath once and giving everyone a fiber connection, or doing it 50+ times? Because if everyone completes the line to their house, that's what will happen.
More importantly, if you're trying to start a business or provide a government service, you can't rely on everyone having a 100Mb connection, you have to plan for the lowest common denominator.
As I would one be of these people, how / who do i talk to ?
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/business/telstras-nbn-deal--what-it-me...
The Liberals messed this one up (note to Americans, in Australia the 'Liberals' are the conservatives).
Edit fate not gate
How will to be obsolete? Everything upto the node is fiber so if it was made obsolete it also would have been obsolete under the original plan.
If your talking about the copper, we aren't digging it up and replacing it with copper. It's just going to stay there a bit longer until it gets upgraded by the user themselves or possibly a another roll out down the line.
What part of the roll out gets wasted? The cabinets they roll out can still handle FTTP, so I don't know what you think will become "obsolete".
By the time the rollout is finished, they're going to need to upgrade to FTTP anyway.
They should have done it properly once. It would've been easier, cheaper and technologically superior.
They are rolling it out as cheaply as possible with no thought about upgrade. They are not running additional fibre to the node only what the node requires. That's why the quotes for the technology choice program are so high, it's not fibre back to the node but all the way to the exchange.
The worst part was the nationals. In 2007 they were bitching that it needed to be fiber, by 2010 they were saying copper is the future.
Even though they'll be career politicians, because nobody will vote anything other than Nationals in those electorates, there's much more money to be made in a life of lobbying afterwards
My suburb, unfortunately, hasn't been NBN-ified - but we still have a VDSL network courtesy of TransACT, the broadband provider that was created when the ACT Government decided to start laying FTTC fibre around Canberra back in the 1990s.
There's a lot of talk of locally-driven "municipal broadband" in the US, but very little in Australia. I expect that's mostly because local governments in Australia are far less powerful than in the United States (which, for the most part, I'm actually okay with) and wouldn't be able to raise taxes and spend them on broadband projects. The Australian Capital Territory, of course, is a special case - a local government with state-level powers, who already owned an electricity network when they decided to go into FTTN as well.
If you were lucky enough to a) live close to the city b) have telephone poles c) live near a telephone exchange and were chosen by Telstra to get FTTN before the change of government you can get 100Mb+ access. [0] Otherwise you are out of luck.
This is largely a political issue that could be fixed by leadership. Australia has weak leaders of both sides of the political spectrum.
Market forces are supposed to fix this problem according to our learned leaders, but it won't. Australia is big, really big and we needed a federally funded optic fibre solution to the country even if it cost a lot.
Here's my version of NBN... Exchange->fibre->POTS
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/pots
[0] Relative has NBN fibre to the node.
Glad someone gets access. Start a software company in the bush.
[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-prepares-2015-finish-d...
[2] http://www.smh.com.au/national/devil-in-the-detail-20100201-...
[2]
I check all those points but no NBN for me :(
Actually just had a look at NBNco's rollout map; both Melbourne and Sydney's CBD are blank.
I live in a new housing development (Zetland - Postcode 2017).
I tried to get NBN installed last week with Internode, one of our ISPs.
They said it was possible, they told me to be at home - I took half the day off WFH - then they ring me halfway saying, whoops, it's not actually connected for your building...err...we'll get back to you about the NBN.
I'm still waiting to hear back.
My parents are told it will be available between April-June 2017 - yet apparently they haven't even started planning it for their area yet. So they somehow hope to design, plan and roll it out in the next 30 days? I call bollocks.
I live in Northern Thailand and have 100/30 uncapped fibre for about $70 a month. I've got a friend who has gigabit and he lives out in some rice fields and its all dirt roads.
I was recently forced from my ADSL2+ service over to the shiny new HFC system. My quality actually degraded - although my bandwidth increased, my latency is off the charts, especially in peak time. I contacted my ISP to see if I could go back to my ADSL2+ service and they flat out said no.
The future is bleak.
Check out the section 'Shared Bandwidth' on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Internet_access
Check out this comparison: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/tech-tips/compare-cable-dsl/pcmc...
And check out the post by Net_Sharing in this forum: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28980221-Speed-Does-cable-b...
Honestly the whole thing smells very strongly of a money-making racket on the part of Telstra (how much money did the CEOs profit from the privatisation only to sell their 100-year-old waterlogged copper back to the government?).
The article is very light on numbers. It would be nice to actually see solid metrics around speeds and costs across the whole of Australia.
Basically, Tony Abbott got in in 2013 and the shitty version of the scheme was put into place.
It's an honest question, because I'm not familiar with any.
I once tried to follow the Udacity course on Tensorflow, but could not download a 10GB that was needed for one of the exercises. Download kept failing and restarting and eventually I killed it after 8 days. Utterly shameful.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthissho...
If you have such requirements, I'm genuinely curious what they'd come back with (solution/$-wise) if you told them what you needed.
(My current awareness of commercial internet is that you can currently get 500Mbps SLA'd fiber for $499 in urban Sydney. Yay? Not so much.)
Wow :(
This is insane. We're getting laser beams, and they're literally going to be worse than cable!
I wonder if NBN Co would agree to do a FTTH setup if I covered the fiber and installation.
Hmm. They might, but then I could be stuck with a $200+/mo Internet bill...
Shakes head ...this is just infuriating, how completely this has been mis-sold and bungled.
I'm just looking for personal-use Internet, and I wanted to join all the cool people with their 1Gbps for $40/mo or whatever they have.
I don't even need a guaranteed SLA, I'm fine with consumer-grade "fair share" bandwidth QoS and stuff.
Seems to me that the NBN Co is merely a sort of centralized rebranding that doesn't really create a competitive advantage.
Can someone help me understand why Australia seems to be so unbelievably backward in terms of advanced technology? I mean, I know there are some decent tech projects here: the CSIRO's antenna array is fairly crazy, I remember seeing SuSE when the news was doing a thing on NOAA about a decade ago, if you ever see a tram's info dashboard reboot you'll see it's based on Ubuntu, the rail transport project being built near where I live is completely driverless, and NSW's existing/legacy rail network is so heavily fiber based, if you look carefully at stations you can see there are fiber drops where you'd usually expect RJ45 (!). That's just what I've seen, but it shows that competent installations exist here.
But the thing is, I reiterate the above because I need reassurance that Australians actually have brains (I say that as one), because the "IT tax" and the Internet situation here and related issues are all just monumentally stupid and frankly an embarassment.
The government doesn't isn't making the bold changes needed to get a Silicon Valley in here fast enough, if you ask me.
(PS. With the fiber drops w/ Transport for NSW - this was easy because the fiber can run alongside the tracks; and I figured out fiber is being done to get infrastructural latency to zero.)
The only reason Australia needed a NBN was because of the sale of Telstra as a vertically integrated monopoly. It should have been split from the start into wholesale and retail as happened in New Zealand. Apparently they were starting to roll out fibre when the sale was announced. It was politically good to sell it as a single unit at the time.
Then when the NBN was announced the opposition and specifically Tony Abbot lacked the vision to see the value and believed that it was just an advanced video game system. Given the power I believe he would have stopped the build entirely. Instead he handed it over to Malcom to "fix". Malcom in order to remain on the cabinet and hopefully push to become prime minister did as ordered and "destroyed" the NBN. The result is what we currently have. The present government cannot fix it because Malcom hung his entire political career on the NBN and to admit that it isn't working would be political suicide for the present government.
This issue seems to occur all over the world where you have fixed terms in politics and politicians who lack the guts to do what is right because they only need to do enough to get re-elected and long term plans are off the table.
I thought Australia doesn't have fixed terms federally?
- Every household and business to have access to broadband with a download data rate of between 25 and 100 megabits per second by late 2016. [We're currently trailing Kenya]
- Key prices for a Coalition NBN will be capped nationally, ensuring Australians in metropolitan and regional areas alike can obtain services at fair prices. [For the low low price of $80 a month, on a 24 month contract, you can get 25Mbps/5Mbps from our two largest telcos: Telstra & Optus] [2] [3]
- "...unshackle the competitive telecom market that Labor tried to stamp out, and reduce the cost of the NBN to prudent levels." [Because of the NBN wholesale cost structure and network inter-connect structure, our retail ISPs are rapidly consolidating. We're likely to have three left standing by the end. To be fair, the latter wasn't the current government's fault.]
- They would complete the network roll-out at 2/3 the cost of the previous plan. [The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in December 2016 that the total network cost will be $49 billion. However, the current government did make the entirely unsubstantiated and unquestioned claim that the $44B plan for FTTP was actually going to cost $90B.] [4]
So, things seem to be going to plan so far. The worst part about all this is that everyone seemed to eat this shit right up at the time. Even Australia's tech so-called 'journalists' were all going on about how the Coalition had presented a 'credible alternative'.
We deserve this, because we're stupid.
[0] PDF of election document: https://www.communications.gov.au/file/315/download?token=8O...
[1] HTML cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ih8ycW...
[2] https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/nbn/nbn-plans
[3] http://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/home-broadband/plans?...
[4] http://www.news.com.au/national/nbn-cost-blowout-to-impact-b...
You basically have to have a humorectomy to be able to follow Australian politics. Otherwise you go crazy from too much cracking up.
--
Some qualifying info to add some substance so this isn't just hyperbole and commentary:
- IIRC, what was happening is that the installers weren't being paid enough, and they were nailing the insulation haphazardly without identifying where the 240V lines ran underneath the batts so they could dodge those areas with their staple guns. Said insulation batts had foil on them. So sparks flew where wood met aluminium and exposed/partially-shorted wiring. Even more tragically, four installers were also electrocuted (AFAIK/IIUC) by live foil on the batts during installation.
- Mr Garret was actually really mature about the situation and took full responsibility, stated that he wasn't fully informed about various risks, and did raise issues about safety multiple times that were not listened to. So there's that.
Some random sources/articles I found:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/peter-garre...
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/peter-...
House fires went down statistically. The absolute number of fires was higher because more homes were getting insulation, but fires per insulated home went down.
The real cause is business efficiency, hiring cheaper workers and not training them properly. You can't hold the government responsible for every grunt a private business hires. You don't hear the current lot taking direct responsibility for the recent shooting in our offshore detention facilities.
Edit - in hindsight it's a perfect example of how "fake news" isn't a recent problem.
> House fires went down statistically. The absolute number of fires was higher because more homes were getting insulation, but fires per insulated home went down.
Oh. I didn't know that. So you mean this occurred after the installation...?
> The real cause is business efficiency, hiring cheaper workers and not training them properly. You can't hold the government responsible for every grunt a private business hires.
Absolutely, yeah. I was trying to get at that idea but didn't quite articulate it. (Thanks.)
> You don't hear the current lot taking direct responsibility for the recent shooting in our offshore detention facilities.
Indeed :/
(I have to admit I honestly just don't understand why the offshore detention system has to be the way that it is. But this is largely due to my ignorance of the various variables and difficulties of the situation.)
Peter Garret basically covered for Rudd
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/04/nothing-malcolm-but...
You can think of the shit infrastructure, crap attitude in general, and intellectually bankrupt waste that make up the political class as the many layers of tax on any high cognitive business in Australia.
Coal is the future apparently. Don't even get me started on the racists.
The "cartoon that united Australians" - Malcolm Turnbull, PM, 2017 (his comment, he's not the cartoonist)
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/53a5099c7991c37bb152ddf53...
Funny one, isn't it.
I'd say the people that think it's racist are the racist ones, all they see is the skin color. They'd think it was a funny joke (or at least be indifferent) about rednecks of the characters were white, but lost their shit when the person is black.
For context, the two biggest issues are alcoholism and especially remoteness. Imagine a poor black community in the US just after segregation ended and then imagine that they were 300Km from the nearest corner store (or maybe this is a problem in the US?). Our welfare system could probably eliminate a lot of the problems in a generation or two in cities but it doesn't make much difference in remote communities.
That's why flukus said "it's your own bias that makes you think it is". If you weren't biased you would just see people being criticized.
No. If this was a comic strip telling a story about a deadbeat father who happened to be black, that would be one thing. But it's a political cartoon. The entire point of the medium is to make broad points using clearly-understood imagery. If a political cartoonist draws a caricature of a black man (big red lips and all), it's either representing a specific public figure, or black people in general (aboriginals, in this case).
So unless you're arguing that the father is a caricature of a specific person who was in the news at the time, there is no way it's not supposed to represent all aboriginals.
We have a history of well-intentioned reformers coming in and making everything much worse: the stolen generation, the NTER, laws against alcohol consumption that cause even more destructive patterns of behaviour, etc. I've known men and women who trained as police, and went off to the NT rosy-cheeked idealists. All came back either depressed or outright racist. It's a hard problem.
Abusive parents create abused children, who grow up to be abusive parents themselves; the same is true of poverty. Abuse and poverty are grinding cycles that are very hard to disrupt. How do you teach a boy who's never met his father about the importance of being there for his own sons and daughters? How do you talk about the cycle without blaming or objectivising the human beings trapped within?
But then, maybe Bill Leak was just plain old racist, and I read a pattern in the noise.
To me the cartoon is staggeringly racist. Clearly, deliberately, outrageously racist. And I am deliberate in my use of the words "deliberate" and "outrageous" because personally I believe in Australia that the proprietor of this particular newspaper makes his money by manufacturing outrage.
To me the cartoon is as racist as the day is long, it's as racist as it is blunt. There's no finesse. There's no guile. There's no dog-whistle or wink to the unspoken. It's a full frontal racist scaling of the ramparts. Which is why I find your comment so intriguing, because you clearly hold a detailed opinion, well communicated, of many different facets you have drawn from the content and how they relate back to social issues in the Northern Territory and yet none of what confronts me occurs to you.
So can I ask you. If I were the proprietor of a newspaper that liked this cartoon but needed it to actually be racist. What would you change? Could you change anything to make this cartoon racist? Or is it not possible. Perhaps we just disagree on what racism is.
Personally, I can't think of a single thing that I could change to increase the amount of racism it expresses. I'm interested to hear your opinion.
When I saw the cartoon I thought it was clearly political satire. When have political cartoons not been heavily dependent on context and difficult to understand if you weren't familiar with what had been happening during the week?
I've heard/read a fair amount of support for and against the cartoon. Some support for it has apparently come from people who have actually gone up to remote aboriginal communities. Some people think that it's a truthful depiction of the problems that are happening up there.
Most of the coverage from the fallout of publishing the cartoon, seemed to me, to be about how racist it was. A lot of outrage. Some stuff about 18C. More outrage. Panel shows with a token aboriginal. Yet more outrage. I honestly don't recall anyone examining what problems indigenous communities actually have. So I guess the cartoon was a failure; it used racist, racial stereotypes and no positive outcome came from it.
We're seeing more and more silliness being imported from the US and UK. Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancelled a talk because of security fears recently. She's been here before and given talks. What the hell changed? I think just this Thursday there were students planning to protest a screening of the Red Pill that was organised by other students at the University of Sydney. Everyone wants to live in an echo chamber. I don't know how we move on from this.
I want to stay on topic. Damn the LNP for screwing up the NBN. I will not get the shitty version of it in my area until 2019.
I was familiar with the affairs of the week, I just didn't read the precision of the OP because I don't think the cartoon was clever. As noted, I thought it was deliberately provocative, outrageous, and deeply, deeply racist.
I find the Australian commentariat interesting:
> So I guess the cartoon was a failure; it used racist, racial stereotypes and no positive outcome came from it.
We agree, the cartoon is racist. So why all the circumlocution around the central point? Is it because it raises uncomfortable questions about Australian culture? Is it really appropriate for your Prime Minister to, of his own volition, choose to exalt a cartoon that includes racist, racial stereotypes?
I expect the OP is a reasonable person, and I suspect I won't ever receive a response to "How would you make that cartoon racist?", because literally every ham-fisted racist trope has already been applied. There's nothing subtle about it.
I'll posit this. That cartoon would never have been printed in The Times of London, The New York Times, or The New Zealand Herald. If it had been we wouldn't collectively expend one iota of the discussion required in Australia to ascertain that, yes, it is racist. It's not really a question that requires much inspection, but here we are.
I'll accept our British, Kiwi, and American friends if they choose to contradict me on that.
And yes, the NBN is a disaster. We're in agreement again.
It's hard to draw a line between pointing out uncomfortable truths in an effort to help, which I consider the role of a political cartoonist, and just slandering the Aboriginal people, which I consider racism. I give Bill Leak the benefit of the doubt because the policeman is Aboriginal. If the policeman was white, I would see the cartoon as blatantly racist, but I believe Leak deliberately made the policeman Aboriginal to contrast the two men: the successful policeman futilely trying to pull a kid out of a downwards spiral, the alcoholic absentee father unable to help, and the son who's already begun to inherit the problems of his father and might one day be in his father's position.
Even if I've read the cartoon correctly, I don't think it was very good, since it clearly failed to communicate its message. What I think of when I see it, though, is one of the Koori kids I went to primary school with, who we'll call Eli. Eli's father was jailed for drug trafficking when we were young, and didn't come back to Eli's mother when he got out. Eli himself grew up to be jailed when he was in his early twenties, after an assault related to drug trafficking, and Eli has a kid on the outside just like his dad did. Racist or not, effective or not, the cartoon accurately shows the process by which Eli ended up in jail.
I have no idea how we can help Aboriginal Australians break out of this spiral. I truly hope we can find a way.
Please understand that even as a johnny-foreigner I'm perfectly well aware of the state of affairs in the NT. You'll note that your not the only Australian that reacts to this cartoon by earnestly explaining their understanding of the social problems of indigenous communities (though the other responding to me is also perfectly comfortable stating the cartoon is racist, but strangely chooses to respond to me, rather than any of the comments claiming the cartoon is not racist, go figure).
I'll posit that everything you mention, to some degree, is common knowledge in Australia. I don't accept that Bill Leak was genuinely trying to play an informative role here. We are also plainly ignoring the fact that this cartoon came in response to reports of aboriginal children being tear-gassed in Don Dale, so it's obviously an attempt to re-apportion blame, no?
If you'll humour me one more time. Imagine that the police-officer is out of frame, just a hand. Can you suggest anything that would make the cartoon of the two remaining aboriginal men racist? Let me help you, perhaps you could exaggerate some physical features, or include some negative stereotype? Has the author missed anything? What would you add to change their representation to be a racist one? It's fascinating that your only suggestion to turn the original cartoon from "not racist" to "blatantly racist" is the ethnicity of one character. Is it true (and it's hard I guess not to deliver this without the tone of an insult, so apologies) that you're perfectly aware that the caricature of the two remaining characters is deeply, deeply racist, it's just that you're comfortable with all the stereotypes they contain? It is racist, but it's ok, in short.
In case you're considering explaining further fine details about aboriginal life, let's say the cartoon was of three greedy hook-nosed sinister jew bankers. I've put literally every trope in I can, exaggerated every physical characteristic, every negative stereotype. Would that cartoon become not-racist because there's some element of truth the idea that Jewish people are a merchant class? And would your time be spent well explaining that to me in fine detail?
Thanks again for the conversation, this has been a fine example in my experience of discussing racial issues with Australians.
Which role did Bill Leak try to play? I believe he bungled an attempt to get the rest of Australia to talk about and fix a problem, but I'm open to the idea that he may have been throwing bigotry around blindly, or trying to shift blame with no intention of doing any good.
It seems that we agree that, in isolation, the caricature of two bare-footed, slack-jawed, slovenly, drunk, ignorant, impoverished indigenous Australians is racist. At least neither of us can think of anything we would add to exacerbate it.
In my example of the hook-nosed Jew, the Jew is the hate-figure. In your counter-example Hitler is the hate figure.
Who is the hate figure in this cartoon? The racist generalisation of the indigenous man. Surely that's problematic?
You're aware that the cartoon was posted in a paper that has history of writing articles titled "Blacks find ways to get high", the cartoonist has a library of similar content where the hate-figure is indigenous, and that this particular cartoon was aimed (and succeeded comfortably) to shift attention from the case of indigenous children being tear gassed.
I'm comfortable that it is racist dross, I'm hoping that I've managed to at least raise that thought with you in a compelling way.
The earnest responses you've received are fairly representative of commonly expressed opinions in Australia. I don't believe it's the majority view, but certainly at large minority at least - including the Prime Minister it appears.
The further context is that cartoon was printed in The Australian, which is basically a Murdoch tabloid but masquerades as the paper of note in Australia. The cartoon in particular was drawn in response to a "Four Corners" (TV) report on the treatment/abuse of children at the Northern Territory's Don Dale detention centre, many of whom were Indigenous.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/17/turnbull-lauds...
So yes, the extra content makes a huge difference.
His assertion that it united the nation is misguided enough (and clearly factually incorrect, though as an outsider you may not be aware of that).
That the PM chose that particular cartoon to exalt speaks volumes.
Skipping the Scandinavian-ish countries name a place less racist?
France? Asia? US? Africa? UK? India?
This discussion is about broadband not sure why you felt the need to Segway to this pointless point.
My comment added some context about one of the main protagonists of the story, I'm comfortable it's cromulent. If not, please, take my internet points.
I understand if you are Australian and find the criticism uncomfortable, but it's a fair reflection of my experience.
My intent wasn't to suggest X is better than Australia, rather to inform the readership of HN that the political paralysis and ineptitude in this country is in no way limited to a single broadband project.
In my opinion my experience adds some context. On reflection I'd be happy to change 'crap' for terrible and so on, but I can't edit that (historical time-out I guess).
Now, if you'll excuse me, my comment has actually spawned a really interesting, intelligent conversation with an Australian about the conduct of the main protagonist of this article, and I don't have any more commentary to add on this point.
The majority of connections opt for 12 or 25mbit anyway, sorry couldn't find url for nbnco statistic.
Technically, dropping billions on fibre in this day and age is stupid given that so much (vast majority) of the population is already in areas that can get faster IP (over 100mbit) from LTE, wireless technology is the future, imagine if it was spent on LTE sites.
Many people use the argument only fibre can do it, when that's just intellectual dishonesty about different types of layer 1.
4 million of Australia's households (roughly half) already have HFC that when upgraded will do gigabit.
It is illegal to compete with NBN.
The NBN was unfunded in its commitment. The same party implemented a $20b/year national disability insurance scheme which was also not funded. All these arguments saying it was bungled, but only the hollow commitments of the unionist/socialist party that implemented this were bungled. A lot of the angry people also don't pay a lot of net tax either which is the usual narrative of the ALP.
So it wasn't properly costed or funded, all these great things that party promised in power, but they still lost the next election anyway, so the people spoke.
Also NYT is fake news. :)