Head in the Sand

More time on policy, less time on framing

"We cannot call this a "National Broadband Network" any more. That term is fundamentally redundant, when around 28 percent of Australian premises will not receive the infrastructure, and most of the rest will receive a watered down version highly dependent on Telstra's copper network."

A defining characteristic of conservative parties is an ideologically driven ignorance which is stubbornly clung to in the face of informed opinion, indeed demonstrated fact. Every expert in the field has stated that the FTTN technology is inferior and can not be updated but must be torn down and rebuilt when this factoid impinges on their collective brain cell. The experience in Germany proves this.

Likewise with global warming and climate change.

We need to be governed by light and reason, not by ideological ignorance.

"the major cause of this year's budget deficit was Joe Hockey's $8.8bn gift to the RBA... an amount of money...roughly equal to that spent by the government annually on higher education."

"It's even tougher to sell something as a budget emergency when you also say we have to wait six months before you'll do anything about it.

Most of the decisions have been handballed to the Commission of Audit, which is due to release its interim report by the end of this month."

As H. L. Mencken, the acerbic social critic of the 1920s, put it: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

And so it continues. LNP governments always do the same thing. Stop everything. Our obscenely rich supporters are not rich enough. We must create smoke and mirrors so we can make them richer at the expense of the poor. The unemployed have no voice: lets grind them further into the dust. What else can we cut? Oh I know: education. We don't want people educated. they might then be able to see through our smoke and mirrors and we wouldn't be able to fool them into electing us again.