The "small breasted porn" issue is incorrect sensationalism, and the idiotic filter idea - which was never going to get through the senate previously - will now not even make it past the house of reps, so I'd be very surprised if we heard anything about it again in the near to medium future.

The department will argue that any filtering on it's own network is an operational issue well outside of the purvey of the house and completely under the responsibility of the department and minister.

Understand?

Government departments don't need legislation to enable them to make decisions regarding the technical operations of their departments so unless the law that allows the NBN *specifically restricts* the implementation of a filter the department can and will demand the ISP implement filtering.

They will simply say "you don't have a right to download illegal material over the public network" if you complain.

I really wish people understood how the public service / executive and government work under our system, it really is very important.

The biggest threat high bandwidth internet has politically, is an end to campaign contributions to pay for commercial broadcasting purposes. Every politician and every political party will be able to upload their message, speeches, supporting performance (on permanent record) to government hosted web sites (local, state and federal) which every citizen can freely access. No more for profit political commercials now that cripples the influence of the rich via mass media and promotes independent politicians as well as enabling smaller political parties to gain access to the electorate upon an equal basis. Additional every single sitting of any legislative body can be recorded, uploaded and accessed by anybody at any time.

Plus think of fun stuff it will enable, web hosted multi site parties, were web cams and big screen TV's can link together multiple locations around the world, for that family reunion Christmas (many sleepless day/night opportunities in there) etc.

Lol very naive, legislation creates the basic outline of an area that the government may move into. Anything reasonably in that area of responsibility if not specifically denied in the legislation is completely up to the department and minister, ceo / executive and minister *until the government says otherwise*.

The legislation doesn't mention the technical setup, the topography the subnets, how many switches, which brand of switches and servers, anti-virus policies and spam policies or anything else to do

Censorship is a government responsibility, and to enable it in new media requires government legislation. So they can't censor it unless they're trying to claim it as an existing media, at which point it can be challenged in court.

That's quite not how it works - the government passes certain kinds of legislation (known as enabling acts) that grants specific groups the ability to "fill in the details" within a set area. They absolutely do need legislation to allow them to do this and for NBNCo or the minister to regulate internet content they would need a specific provision say that they are to develop regulations on content that is allowed to pass through the service.

1. NBN is not a government department. I really wish people would understand how the NBN is structured, it really is very important. It will not be run by dept of innovation or any other department.

2. Government departments rely on legislation as a backing and don't make unilateral decisions. It more works the opposite of how you describe. If there is legislation stating that they MAY do something, then they might or might not. If there's no legislation stating that they may then they won't.

An easy example is the immigration department. The law states that the minister MAY grant citizenship if you fall into X/Y/Z categories. Based on this legislation:-if you fall into X/Y/Z immigration department might or might not grant you citizenship-if you do not fall into X/Y/Z categories, the immigration department WILL NOT grant you citizenship. They are not empowered to even though there's nothing in legislation stating they can't.

What network? The 'department' has a badly run network that has nothing to do with the NBN as that's owned by a separate company. The government hopes to privatise that company once they've spent enough tax money on it.

Government departments don't need legislation to enable them to make decisions.

What? The department can't order paperclips without enabling legislation, even if it's only a supply bill.

I really wish people understood how the public service / executive and government work under our system, it really is very important.

and the idiotic filter idea - which was never going to get through the senate previously - will now not even make it past the house of reps, so I'd be very surprised if we heard anything about it again in the near to medium future.

Yes the DO! Imagine THIS at 1 Gbps! Hey, it's legal, he has no breasts.

That does not mean there are not people out there fapping away to Barney the Dinosaur. Trust me on that.

The whole breast issue is idiotic. What we need is a fapability index. Anything over a.08 fapability index gets instantly rejected by the routers themselves. Of course training the computers and creating the index will require enormous amounts of manpower.

Of course being the good, honest, pure, God fearing Christian that I is, I am w

Greens/Liberals/Independants hold the balance of power and are all dead set against the filter. It's a dead scheme stop mentioning it. There will be no mandatory net filter in Australia. The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.

As stated on Q&A, the vast majority (at least 80%) of legislation is passed through the House of Reps unanimously. Only the contentious legislation is held up for debate.

The ignorant masses need to watch quality current affairs and quality interviews once in a while rather than Today Tonight "OMG the Murdoch media empire said something bad about Labor so it must be true we're all going to die thanks to Labor now lets see how Masterchef is doing".

While I agree with you, it's important to remember that the Liberals haven't actually said they won't support the filter. Joe Hockey has said they won't support the filter, but he is neither the leader, nor the communications minister.

That said, the filter was always a dead scheme, which is why Labor never tried to push it through.

Yep. They did come out against the filter fairly definitively in the end, however I still would not put it past them to have a "conscience vote" on it when it comes to the crunch - in which case even if less than 1/3 of them supported it it would still fly through the senate. Which is to say, it still entirely possible that this will happen.

My biggest concern about the NBN is that it will make it extremely simple for a future government to implement such a policy, possibly without putting it through pa

I suspect at least one problem with the idea of sneaking filtering into the NBN is that much of the opposition to filtering is coming from the same technical sector that would be needed to design and build it.

Actually, I attended the National IT Debate just before the election and the liberal minister for communications did explicitly say that the Liberals were against the filter and would prefer to return to the old Howard policy of providing filtering software for free that people could install on their own computer (and thus not affect others)

But they aren't, that's the problem. They're neo-cons these days. Someone like Malcolm Turnbull would be a true "Liberal", Tony Abbott (the guy who knifed Malcolm Turnbull to run the Liberals) is definitely a neo-con. They run the party these days and cop a lot of shit from Malcolm Fraser (one of the Liberal greats) for it.

In the interests of accuracy, it wasn't abbott who knifed turnbull in the back (although I can't stand Abbott).
Another MP triggered a leadership spill (Maybe Costello?) but Abbott was the third candidate and he skated in on the backs of both factions hating the 'other guy' more than they hated Abbott.

I think the argument is in the sense that the Menzies Liberals represent the "true Liberals", and that Turnbull upholds this tradition more so than Abbott et al., who are far more in the Howard-post-9/11 Liberal mould.

The veracity of this judgement is left to your own political views as to what represents "true Liberal" and how closely Turnbull matches it.

He also does enormous amounts of volunteer work out in central Australia

Only if you consider less than the average working week "enormous". It was nothing but a couple of days to set up for a photo-op to repair the damage to his reputation he took as a Minister when he was supposed to try to fix the problems in remote communities. The guy is a carboard cutout on pretty well every issue - for instance he's only a Catholic in front of an audience. He wasn't called the "mad monk" for being thrown out of a s

I have a legitimate question for any Aussies on/. Here in the US, the title "Liberal" refers to spineless douchebags who act like conservatives with their own money, property, etc., but who love to micromanage other people's money, property, and selves. Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?

For many years the Australian Liberals have been the friends of the "big end of town" often at the expense of their natural constituency, small and medium businesses. The Liberals have had a reasonably successful policy of privatising public assets, socialising business losses and doling out "middle-class welfare". Under the last Liberal government of John Howard, their success was ensured by relatively high levels of taxation and then using the money collected to bribe the swinging voter immediately before an election. Now their opponents, the Labor party, seem to be ensuring their survival by pork-barrelling the minority independents. Many of us note that everything seemed to work quite well over the last couple of months when Parliament did not sit and no legislation was passed.

Perhaps, and to a slightly less extent, but I don't see anything particularly pro-Labour in my post. They all tend to be self-serving professional politicians.

Many years ago (40+) my late father, who was a senior local government officer (he made Sir Humphrey Appleby look like a bumbling amateur), told me the truth about politicians - They are mostly in it for themselves, and tend to tell lies.
You, as a voter, have the choice of voting for a politician who was selected by one of two very small groups of people (to look after their own interests). It is easy to recognise these people. They either smoke cigars and drink spirits in a small smoky room at the back of the Rotary Club (Conservative/Liberal); or they smoke fags and drink beer in a small smoky room at the back of the Working Man's Club (Labour/Labor). These politicians are venal and corrupt.
Or, you could vote for someone who has a burning desire to help people. These politicians are obsessive and very dangerous - They believe that "The End justifies the Means".
He was firmly of the opinion that most people really don't want much change, they just want their lives to be a little better.
His advice: At National level - If the politician that you already have is a member of one of the major parties, vote for their opponent. At local level - Vote for the one who lives nearest to you - You might get your rubbish removed, and your street lights will probably work. Now that I am older, I suspect he was right...

Ref: Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority."

I have a legitimate question for any Aussies on/. Here in the US, the title "Liberal" refers to spineless douchebags who act like conservatives with their own money, property, etc., but who love to micromanage other people's money, property, and selves. Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?

Actually, looking in from the outside, it seems to me that in the USA the term "liberal" is a meaningless epithet applied by the conservative media to anyone that they don't like.

In Australia the term "Liberal" means "a member of the Liberal Party of Australia [wikipedia.org]", or a person who regularly votes for the same.

Actually, the ETS (at least) has a reasonably good chance of being passed in some form. Yes, Labor will need the support of the Greens MPtwo independents, but Oakeshott will probably be in favour and Windsor, although opposing the existing scheme, is generally in favour of an emissions trading scheme. The Greens opposed the scheme originally because they knew it couldn't be passed even with their support, and thought they'd gain more political mileage by being the Extreme Left voice.
Now that they're actua

The NBN is already being rolled out around Australia, and is available through much of Tasmania. It hasn't got a filter. The filtering is a separate piece of legislation that doesn't have the legs to get through the new parliament, with the Opposition and the Greens opposing it.

It also does not exist under the exclusive executive oversight of the government. It is being set up along the lines of existing government-sponsored enterprises such as Australia Post or Medibank Private; furthermore, while the government will have a controlling stake the intent is for half the company to be privately owned & funded. The "$43 billion" headline figure only includes $26 billion of government funding, with the remainder expected to be raised from the market.

NBN Co is ultimately responsible for the infrastructure, but the internet service provision is not part of its mandate - they might be providing the pipes, but it's ultimately up to the ISPs still to deliver the actual internet. See the NBN plans offered by iiNet in Tasmania, for instance.

As for the idea that you could go back to using "normal ADSL" through the "private network", that's wrong too. The whole idea here is to rip up the old copper wherever possible and replace it with fiber. That is the dramatic dividend this will provide - telephony is going to totally change in Australia. That's what $11 billion is going to Telstra for.

I'm rather enjoying good ol' Stephen Conroy trying in vain to introduce the filter!

As I just pointed out below, this is no longer about trying to introduce the filter, it will obviously fail. It is about making Abbott vote down the Australian Christian Lobby's [australian...bby.org.au] pet project.

OK, so this seems like a good idea - but what can we do with it? Having that kind of speed is great, but only if you have infrastructure that can serve you data that fast. We're a long way from anywhere and have only a limited amount of fibre connections to other countries (where I imagine most data will come from), this is reflected in the silly high prices we pay for data already.

So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?

We're a long way from anywhere and have only a limited amount of fibre connections to other countries (where I imagine most data will come from), this is reflected in the silly high prices we pay for data already... So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?

A lot of data/content can be cached on continent. Akamai claims that:
"Akamai routinely delivers between fifteen and thirty percent of all Web traffic, reaching more than 4 Terabits per second."http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/index.html [akamai.com]

"Akamai routinely delivers between fifteen and thirty percent of all Web traffic,"

Watch the doublespeak, it's not between 15 and 30% of all Internet traffic. Very much content *could* be cached, if you'd allow the mother of all copyright-infringing servers to sit on the border. Until then, there'll be tons of P2P traffic dragging content from edge to edge of the network.

stop thinking globally and think locally.
when we get the NBN up, major IT contenders such as google, microsoft, facebook, youtube will have local caches within australia, jobs will be created from expansions of such companies, more data centres... let alone medical applications, video conferencing, IPTV streaming, extremely cheap phone calls, ability then to setup local call centres...
Education expansion, schools no longer have to be where the most people are when it can be done vide a video link.
More b

So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?

If you build it he will come.

At the moment, everything is overseas because it's not practical to have them here. As soon as we have the infrastructure in place, not only does it become more practical to mirror a lot of content and as well as provide additional services here, but it provides an underlying platform for new services to be created/invented.

So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?

Well not upgrading our networks till the end of eternity definitely is not the solution to getting faster data services. Do you not realise that part of the FTTH is also upgrading of infrastructure? Or are you complaining about international data? Because part of what makes an area lucrative for data centres and such is the ability to connect to high speed infrastructure.

Therefore it will not be able to pass through either house of parliament unless the Liberal/National Coalition switch their position (which wouldnt surprise me)

Actually I would be very surprised. They would have to do a complete 180 flip on how they've behaved as the opposing party for the last 3 years. Which mainly consists of opposing everything and slagging off at every opportunity. I dare say that's part of the reason why the Greens got 4% of the swing away from Labor and the Coalition (liberals) only got 1.5%. Admittedly they need to change their tactics, but being a conservative party, change isn't going to happen fast.

New parties in power often do 180's. In the U.S. just look at Republicans/Democrats. Republicans were all for cutting spending, as long as it was Democrats who controlled the purse. The second they took over, they went on a spending spree that would make Paris Hilton blush. And, now that the Dems are back in, suddenly they've "rediscovered" their fiscal conservatism. Ditto for the Dems. Obama was all for scaling back Presidential power and Bush's more Draconian surveillance/security policies. But, now that

Yep. We got just the -precisely- well balanced minority government, toa. get a NO to get the filter shot down, not only in the senate where it would have been shot down anyway, but in the house of reps as well.b. get a YES on the NBN.c. get Better Place in (who were stamped all over the Labor's promised intentions in all but name, and who already landed access to ~100M$ of govt money in NSW) and thoroughly funded via some serious consumer-enticing EV-adoption tax breaks I suspect are coming circa 2012-2013.

We had someone post on the guild forums that they were planning to join Telstra Bigpond and they got this response:

Why god why!? What in the hell possessed you to decide to join _them_? Have you finally gone completely insane, are you punishing yourself for something you've done, have you been befuddled by evil little imps sent by _them_, what is wrong with you man!? Think of your wife and child, turn back from the dark side, telstra isn't really your f

You have to be shitting me, Im on a ADSL2+ connection with a 500GB cap for the same price I used to pay for dial up (100mb limit/mnth) 12 years ago. Dodo is now offering a "unlimit" ADSL2+ service "yes no cap at all" for $49/mnth. My parents were on a 256kb/s 2GB a month account until I visited them and made a few phone calls, now they have ADSL2+ with 2-8mb/s down and a 200GB cap for $39. I find most people complaining about speed and caps these days are just lazy or don't

That's unfortunate for me. I don't really care for the US, and Im a citizen here. I like the people, and the geography in the northwest, but our government is a joke. Its completely ruled by special interests geared at funneling as much money as possible into the hands of a few. We have no such thing as affordable health care. You may as well die rather than burden your family with medical bills if you get any terminal illness, even if its a treatable one. We live in essentially pretty close to an aristocra

surplus? I am sorry you must be thinking of some other country. We have a deficit since labor came in with a projected surplus in 2 or 3 years time, but even that is dependent on geting controversial mining tax through and NBN actually staying on budget, neither is currently highly likely.

yep it is an incredibly dangerous tax in what is currently a declining market. There is also a lot of questions around the estimated tax income considering labor seem to have claimed tax revenues on the market increasing rather than going backwards 50% + like it has been doing.

I have no business commenting on your politics, but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already.

You really don't - it's not so unpopular with citizens as it is with the special interests in the mining sector, and they managed to sell it well for a sector of the economy that barely makes up some 7% of our GDP. I noted you were bemoaning the special interest groups ruling the roost in the US by funnelling the money from the wider economy (this tax was counter-balanced with a broad cut in company tax), and yet here you are tut-tutting a tax proposed by a party which stands against these groups?

but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already

It's not since we'd be fools to just let large mining companies take *our* resources out of *our* ground without paying a reasonable tax on them. The government isn't squandering the money either, they're using it to help fund superannuation increases meaning we might be the about the only western country that can actually afford to fund the retirement of our ageing population.

It is not really that dangerous... for a couple of reasons1. The mining industry is responsible for 80% of Australia's energy consumption (this is largely subsidised by taxpayers). 40% of that is just crushing rocks.2. The mining industry hasn't always been our biggest. Primary industry was except for the last 13 years we've been in drought. The drought has ended and we are in for a bumper crop, once again. One of our biggest competitors, Russia, is in major drought.3. Our services industry is actually huge (a big reason for the NBN).4. Our education industry is huge (was number 2 bread winner for at least 30 years straight)5. The mining industry has actually agreed to the tax.

The tax is structured as follows: for earnings above government bond rate + 7% return on investments in iron ore and coal, a tax rate of 30% will apply. There's a 25% extraction allowance, so the effective rate will be 22.5%. State royalties are deductible.

Say whatever you want for coal in the context of climate change efforts, it isn't going away soon. And iron ore is always going to be needed as a basic resource for building practically anything dur

That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states, with a housing price epidemic and using sweet fuck all sustainable power - but hey we can get really fast internet! Even though our international links aren't even that good and a heap of city dwelling people can get from 8 to 24mb/s now,.......

That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states,

Cant do jack against mother nature. With the ENSO event last year this has lessened somewhat. Perhaps if people stopped wasting so much water on lawns and washing their hotted up HSV we wouldn't have such a crisis.

with a housing price epidemic

Limited land, bad land releases and a few companies have a stranglehold on constructions. Do you suggest the government give land away or fix prices for private corporations (because that will go down well on SlashLibertarian). Point in short, problem is procedural and throwing cash at it wont help.

using sweet fuck all sustainable power

Every time someone utters the word "Nuclear" the NIMBYS are up in arms taking torches and pitchforks to parliament house on sixty minutes. The same NIMBYs who complain about housing prices, broadband costs and water crisies but cant stop washing their cars every second day and watering their lawns in the middle of the day (40+ C is not unusual in Australia folks).

but hey we can get really fast internet!

Which will spur economic and scientific growth and get us out of this communications dark age we are currently living in. CLUE: we are competitive with Russia for broadband, that puts us at #42 in the world. Economically we are a first world nations about #12-15 from the top.

You criticise the government for not fixing problems it can do little about by criticising the government when it does do something to fix a problem it can do something about. Jesus H Christ, Australia doesn't need any more people like you.

Lets break down the numbers, out of that 43 billion, 16 billion is being contributed by private entities. So that's 27 billion. Divide that by 11 million households and thats less then A$2500 per household. Amortise that over a 20 year lifespan (20 year minimum, 40 more likely) and its $125 per year, per household. A bloody bargain at twice the price. OTOH, lets look at the Sydney harbour bridge. That cost 60 Million to build in the 20's, we didn't pay it off for 60 years... as long as we dont count the economic benefits of the North Sydney CBD created directly as a result of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (oh and theres a bit of tourism $$$ for that iconic structure).

2012-2013. Better Place rolls out all of the east coast.Read:[a] Most of the national car fleet off oil in 10 years...[b]... and powered of 100% renewable energy...[c]... which, due to the distributed-battery-nature and smart-charging-grid/ERGO(=EV equivalent of a cellular network operator), becomes the first-ever national-scale distributed-battery-cache to cache up spare-dirty/renewable power generated at night(wind) or when the sun is out (solar), whe

I honestly did not know about "better place". Maybe because I live on in Perth (yes, I'm pretty disgusted with it myself). Australia is fairly green for a western industrialised nation, most LGov (local Government) run recycling programs and either dual bin or single bin recycling.

I would like to see a nuclear power industry in Australia as opposed to coal, oil and natural gas that we have currently but I cant se

Australia doesn't have the fuel processing infrastructure to make it worth it with the current technology (sad to say, without a military nuke infrastructure to leech off things are difficult with civilian nukes). That may change with technology that is under development or imported fuel could be used with current technology.For most current designs it's not worth contemplating nuclear unless it's something really big to give an economy of scale (lots of steam),

I disagree, the amount of money the government puts into building new coal and gas plants will pay for most of it. As you pointed out, a fuel processing industry will grow around the requirement for one.

Private corps didn't build the plants they now own, they were built using public money and then sold off to private corps (mostly by the Howard govt). Hence power costs are sky-rocketing due to profiteering (mine went up 40%).

I disagree, the amount of money the government puts into building new coal and gas plants will pay for most of it.

The expense is vastly more because it means the establishment of an entire new industry to provide the fuel while a new coal fired plant piggybacks on existing infrastructure. The first nuke plant of any size will cost a fortune - after that it's less per plant. Look at the Iranian situation for a recent example, and even that is riding on the back of military spending.Your power bill has gon

No it isn't. For a rich (per person) first world nation we have third world broadband. In speed, quality and service. In Thailand you can get 10 Mbit fiber for approx $150 per month. Here that costs A$1400

Are you suggesting that the high price of speedy internet in Australia comes at "no cost to the nation"?

On top of providing first class internet access for Australians, it will bring the ongoing cost of accessing broadband down significantly. Already, the mere talk of an NBN has broken Telstra's anticompetitive back. Sol was arguably forced out of Telstra as a direct result of the NBN announcement. Until this announcement, Telstra was holding all Australian's back at 8mbps maximums.

That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states, with a housing price epidemic and using sweet fuck all sustainable power - but hey we can get really fast internet!

Australia also has the world's 2nd highest standard of living (HDI), per capita GDP that put it among the top few richest nations on the planet, the smallest government debt and deficit of any major western economy etc.It'll always be possible to point out problems in the country but that doesn't mean we should not do

Because in any other area that the government provides a service and does it badly it's perfectly right to complain and/or try to get it fixed.

Please leave your stupid paranoia of government services in your head with the other crazy ideas. some things make sense for a government to provide, or even wouldn't happen without it. But i forgot, that's socialism in your mind isn't it? And anything that is tainted with socialism is necessarily bad...

Well, I'm not allowed to vote (yet), so I didn't think too hard about who I would have cast a vote for. most likely the sex party and then the greens. Choosing between the major two wasn't possible. On the one hand you've got the filter, on the other scrapping the NBN and putting the religious brigade in charge again.

IMHO, Conroy should not be allowed any more power than choosing his own dinner.

My problem with the original poster was that it was just the usual "OMG! Gubmint services!" nonsense. I dislike au

Given that the many "corporations" (small businesses and small ISPs save four) that currently offer internet access in Australia are in vicious competition with each other and services are improving yearly, yes. I would rather be able to say screw you Telstra 3g I'm going with Optus 3G because it's better, wait now I'm going with Internode because they're better than both.

Then say screw you government monopoly NBN ISP who has implemented filtering I'm going with....oh, all the other are gone or eye waterin

My line of thought was more like the situation in north america, where in a lot of areas there is effectively no competition. You've got DSL if you aren't too far from the CO, or perhaps cable. if those suck you're pretty much stuck with satellite, which... leaves something to be desired.

At least if the only provider was govn't owned, you could write to your local seat of govn't, or vote on the issue. whatever.

The majority of Australians *want* the Internet to be filtered, and the government is accountable to *them* not *you*.

I call BS. I haven't met one person who actually said they want internet censorship in Australia.

The government couldn't even give NetAlert [netalert.gov.au] away when they tried - nobody wanted it, it was "cracked" by a kid inside of a week, and the few religious zealots who did get it now find themselves unsupported.

Unfortunately the not-quite-majority of Australians who voted Labor at the last election fell for the "look at the silly monkey" trick (the high-speed National Broadband Network) and failed to notice the venomous snake (internet censorship) in the other hand.

And here's a tip for you: The majority of Australians *want* the Internet to be filtered, and the government is accountable to *them* not *you*. So now what?

What? How on Earth did you come to that conclusion? I'd like a citation please. I doubt very much you can give me one though. Other parts of your comment mention 3G rather prominently for some unimaginable reason. Here's a tip for you: 3G is not the internet. Here's another tip for you: you don't know what you're talking about.

And you probably don't know this, but technically it wasn't the Australian people that voted for this government. It was the cross-benchers. So don't tell us what we can or can't complain about.

I actually think that a lot of the choice was made for the cross benchers by the voting that happened in the senate. No-one holding a balance of power would really want to join a lower house government knowing that everything can be blocked by the upper house anyway.

This whole election outcome is a massive lose-lose scenario for Australia. A half decent majority by EITHER of the main parties would have been a better outcome. They would have at least had the opportunity to try a few ideas out. Would all h

If the pedophiles want to complain that Labor is blocking their access to their pedophilia then let them.

I wish it was only that kind of material that's getting blocked.

Unfortunately it isn't... filtering trials showed that a number of businesses, community support groups, dentists [smh.com.au], anti-abortion political sites [smh.com.au] and even a betting agency [computerworld.com.au] were also getting blocked. If the ACMA were accountable for what gets blocked this wouldn't be a problem, but the block list is marked SECRET and they won't even acknowledge whether a given URI or site is in it, let alone allow you to state your case to have it removed. Where

4. Australians will stick with their (possibly) slower current technology services when given the alternative of a faster, but significantly more expensive solution.

Not possible. Remember that "agreement" that the government reached with Telstra? They agreed to "sell" their customers to NBN Co. when NBN rollout is complete in an area. This means that once NBN is available in your area you will be forced to use it or use nothing, because all alternatives will be removed by law.

This means that once NBN is available in your area you will be forced to use it or use nothing, because all alternatives will be removed by law.

Not only by law, by physical effort too - the copper is going to be ripped up, since this is a fiber to the home solution. That's what makes the NBN a revolution in communication, not just an upgrade of infrastructure.

Well, some people would say that Australia itself is a Great White Elephant - maybe it is looking forward to said shafting.

1. The true cost will be much greater than $43 billion. This figure - guaranteed to blow out anyway - includes no allowance for the interest and other borrowing charges that will be incurred by the project. The true cost may be greater than $200 billion.

Anybody with a keyboard can pontificate mindlessly. The fact is that the "magic 43 billion dollars" was *always* "the government are willing to spend up to", it was not a budget it was not a costing estimate it was a "we will not contribute more than". It's entirely possible it may cost more, it may cost less, but The Government said THEY will not spend more than 43B.

2. Funding sources for the project have not been defined. The Government's exposure is 20-something million in initial investment, with the remainder supposed to come from the private sector. Especially given the failure of other public-private-partnerships (Brisbane, Sydney...) who would be foolish enough to tip billions into another government stuff-up?

Relax.Conroy isn't in a position to do anything, not only is there a Greens majority in the senate that'll mercilessly machine-gun the whole scheme down if it ever gets that far...... now he won't even be able to pass it in the house to begin with - the libs and independents are officially opposed to the filter, and even if every member of labour will vote in favor, he doesn't have enough for a "think of the children" bill.

And once everyone has an interwebs pipe as wide as the simpson desert for his last-m