The Election and the NBN

I have been following the progress on the Governments negotiations with Telstra and the other powers that be over the new plan for Fibre to the home. All along, if they'd bothered to follow Marconomic principles they'd know full well that the idea is to separate infrastructure elements from the applications, data plans, and the selling of the information itself. The infrastructure would then be owned by the federal government and the rest would be allowed to have market forces at play and essentially be privately run. It appears that the Labor Government had finally achieved this with the go ahead, budgeting and rollout starting - The NBN would be a government run company that would own the new fibre. Private organisations, including Telstra would then pay for capacity on these to sell plans to consumers and to run new applications on etc. This, once built would fix the constant conflict of interest of Telstra owning infrastructure that competitors need to compete with Telstra. There is just no way of making it fair without separating infrastructure from the marketable aspects of the capacity of the infrastructure.

What the Labor Government had come up with should have always been bipartisan. This would have neutralised the issue in voters such as me. Having seen the alternative plan of the Liberals, which although vague in specific ownership details, gives the impression that government investment will be more wasteful than private investment, regardless of whether it is long term or short term investment.

Telstra and land developers can not be trusted to have appropriate cabling in place even in new suburbs. So often (our suburb included) developers have opted for the cheapest possible cabling because to them it is a cost without any visible gain in land prices. Concern that the whole suburb has to be inefficiently dug up again to upgrade the lines down the track is not on their radar or their balance sheet.

It is less efficient to regulate standards of cable (fibre) speed that has to be laid, then for the Government to own it in the first place, and their shouldn't be the pressure on geting a short term return on the investment either. As it is with roads, power cables, railways, airports and sewerage pipes it should be with data transmission - the Government should own the infrastructure - pure and simple.

Top ten reasons why I (we) are having six children.

1) We has done some naughty stuff and deserve to get punished.

2) 6 is a perfect number (ie. the sum of its factors other than itself {1,2,3} add up to itself). The next one after 6 is 28.

3) With all these boat people coming in, we have to even the odds by having as many home grown children ourselves- to try our best to balance the numbers.

4) We need to have children in the age group to bridge the gap between our children and future grandchildren - so there will be always slightly older children to help one, and slightly younger children to help down the track.

5) We are going to keep having children until we get one that we like.

6) We wanted to make complete a grand experiment to see whether it is better to raise children early (20's) later (30's) or really later (40's)

7) We want a play mate for our 5th quite close in age.

8) We are sick of having a family with a respectable number of children.

9) The couple who gets to menopause with the greatest number of well-adjusted children wins!

10) They are soooo... cute!

Let me introduce myself

Hi, My name is Marco - I have five children, three dogs, a worm farm and a pregnant wife - And I've just turned forty. So much is happening in my day to day life that is interesting, but I have absolutely no time to reflect. I am quite tempted to switch to posting updates to facebook, because Ironically, when I post to my blog that can be accessed globally by anyone... no-one reads it, but when little odd tidbits get posted on facebook, many strangers as well as most of my friends find out one way or another.