Yes, that was my previous point, this is a new point. Do keep up. Although you do seem to think the public purse is without a bottom.
Yes, obviously. Thinking the Government should build fundamental and key national infrastructure with a lifetime measured in generations means I "think the public purse is without a bottom".
What utter tripe. Our *cities* are some of the most urbanised perhaps, but look outside of them and you have thousands of square kilometres of nothing but desert.
Yes ? Who is suggesting we put fibre drops in the middle of the desert ? Do we not have phone and power lines strung all across the country ? Do we not have roads and trainlines between almost every city, town, village and farm in the country ? Are we so much poorer and less capable than our grandparents we struggle to comprehend barely matching their achievements, let alone exceeding them ?
FFS. 2/3 of the country lives in five cities. 3/4 in the largest ten. Trying to pretend some family on a property a couple of hours drive from the nearest other building is relevant to whether or not they get FTTH is just disingenuous.
Actually in the original policy, they were, then finally someone looked at the numbers.
A reasonable compromise then.
The point is, rapid revenue creation would take place in urban areas, thereby funding the more expensive regional rollout.
No, it almost certainly would not. And the Government doesn't need revenue to fund infrastructure. That's not how the system works.
Now we find ourselves with someone at the back of Bourke on a highly subsidised satellite getting better speeds than someone 4km from a major city, who, due to a RIM can only get 1Mbps max.
Yes, I'm sure we can find anecdotal examples of any case we want. But that's not relevant to the overall pictures.
In general rural dwellers have horrendously poor connectivity and
in general urban dwellers have good options.
While your rusted on political bias is clear, many Liberal voters have no such bias. In fact I would imagine most of them want to ensure quality internet connectivity gets to the regions.
"Rusted on political bias."
I have no adherence to or affiliation with any political party. If I had my way they wouldn't even be allowed to exist.
The Liberal Party has a fundamental, clear, unabashed and increasing bias against publicly funded infrastructure and services, other than as an avenue for funnelling public funds into [a small number of] private hands. They believe pretty much every service except the Police should be provided by private industry. That's not "political bias", it's an observation of Liberal Party rhetoric and policy for the last few decades.
Perhaps if infrastructure was decoupled from political terms we might see some better planning, but at the end of the day, if you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, why should the taxpayer subsidise your existence?
Because taxpayers subsidising each other is how civilisation works. There are countries where taxpayers do not subsidise each other if you would prefer that. Most of them are not particularly nice places to live.
If infrastructure could be decoupled from political terms we'd already be well on the way to a FTTH NBN, with a few reasonable and logical compromises around things like rollout schedules and extremely remote rural dwellers, apartments, etc. Why ? Because building anything other than a primarily FTTP telecoms infrastructure today would be stupid.
Instead, we got the Liberal Party shamelessly scaremongering about debt and lying about cost estimates, presenting ubiquitous high-speed internet as good for nothing except watching cough and playing games, and the Prime Minister of the day childishly play internal party politics with it to try and humiliate and discredit his perceived (and, as it turned out, actual) competitor (someone who well understands the value of the internet, and FTTH vs FTTN).
Anyway, we both know this intense focus on a handful of extremely isolated rural dwellers is just a transparent red herring to distract and misdirect from the actual discussion, which is a proper fibre network to the vast, vast majority of Australians that live in urbanised areas.
