Labor wins: here comes the NBN, filter, taxes and waste

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:19

Opinion and Analysis

It’s a troubling day for Australia with the announcement that the Labor party has, through the support of the Greens and three independents, won the election, theoretically guaranteeing us a monumentally wasteful National Broadband Network, the possibility of a freedom-killing filter, business-killing taxes and more.

OPINION: It's a truly troubling day for Australia. Tens of billions of dollars are now set to be wasted on killing competition in Australia’s broadband sector just as billions more are set to be stolen from Australia’s miners.

Despite cries from the Greens that they are against a filter, the Minister for Broadband and Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, has previously insisted he is still committed to intrusively bringing one into the lives and living rooms of Australians – despite a 12 month smokescreen of a delay.

Given Senator Conroy’s deep, deep freedom-killing desire to bring one into being, we certainly haven’t heard the last of the filter.

As for the NBN, the vast majority of those who want the speeds of a national broadband network still have years to wait before any fibre comes down their street – the NBN won’t be switched on overnight. Prepare for massive cost-overruns and building the broadband revolution scandals. 

Then there’s the ridiculous notions of carbon taxes and the general nature of the Labor and Green parties to tax, tax, tax and more taxation.

This means that any supposed savings you’ll get on your broadband bill (years down the line) will be more than made up for by ridiculously high charges to come on your power bills and virtually every other bill you pay. Here comes inflation! Do you earn enough money to survive the coming fiscal onslaught?

There’s really not much more to say on the matter: Australia is now in store for the most left-wing government it has ever seen. Presumably Hugo Chavez is celebrating and preparing to make a victory-tour down under.

Ultimately, it appears that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was right when he said that the coalition is a government-in-waiting. It just looks like they’ll have to wait quite a bit longer. I can only hope the Labor-Green alliance doesn’t stuff up the country too irreversibly, first.

Congratulations, Australia. We now have the government we deserve. It looks like the old adage of humans needing to find things out the hard way before changing the way they do things is as true as ever.

To win the confidence of the other half of the electorate, the Labor-Green alliance has a lot of hard work to do to show they deserve re-election in three years time. All of us, whether for or against today's developments, will certainly be watching very, very closely.