It's a pity that such things are the only exposure the tech crowd has to Australia, instead of more compelling things like the massive and ambitious National Broadband Network fiber-to-the-home infrastructure project.
Or, as it will be known on Saturday evening: copper to the "good luck with that".
(Some context: the opposition party -- which apparently is going to win? I don't follow politics too closely -- was suggesting that the NBN project could be done more cheaply if it was fiber-to-the-node instead... thus completely defeating the purpose of the network upgrade.)
A colleague says that there are Murdoch's hands in the till on this one, given that fast internet threatens his TV offerings.
That's basically all it comes down to. Not enough people care about what a fast network can do for the country, and they've been brainwashed to think that the economic management of the last few years has been appalling.
It's really really strange. People all of a sudden seem to give a shit about how much we are spending and think it's a bad thing, when every economic commenter has said it's been managed brilliantly. It looks like a lot of people are trying to be smart and are failing hugely.
It's the same problem the US has IMO: no one wants to support grand, forward-looking projects that are going to take longer than a term in office. That's why poor NASA has its funding yoyo-ed around a 4-year presidential election cycle, and can't ever follow through on the bigger projects anymore.
[0]: Includes child porn and "morally offensive" sites, whatever that means.
As far as the data-logging goes, I meant it as done by the native government -- although I agree that's largely a "tomato, tomahto" distinction.