Come on down, Luke 'Mañana' Hartsuyker!

The ever laid back Nats MP Luke Hartsuyker told The Coffs Coast Advocate this month that "We're not in fantasy land, a dream sci-fi world. We have to deliver affordable broadband to people quickly" and the cost of bringing fast broadband into the house will be "addressed as time went by".

Come again?

Labor will give me free fast broadband connection into my house by 2021.

Luke will give me slower broadband to a junction box somewhere into my street by 2019 and I will have to pay for every metre of cable laid from that box into my house.

If - and it’s a big if – I can afford it.

And if I move house I bet I’ll be paying again under Luke’s plan.

So till the day I win Lotto Luke expects me to get his broadband to my PC via Telstra’s 100 year-old copper wire phone network which in 2003 even that telco said was within "five minutes to midnight" of its deathbed.

I could almost hear fellow voters falling off their chairs when they read Hartsuyker’s comments.

No wonder many techies fell about laughing when he said the Coalition broadband scheme was a win for regional areas. They know that sending broadband to a computer along old copper wire will never give the fast download speeds of fibre optic cable.

What Hartsuyker is really offering the North Coast is a souped up version of this:

For which he expects us all "to pay up to $5000" each to upgrade if Labor's Janelle Saffin is right.

Pic from the folks at CSIRO

Gillard is verballed. How many times is that now?

In 2005 then Treasurer Peter Costello said this:

“CANBERRA: Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown. Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament. “If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you,” he said on national television. “I’d be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false. If you can’t agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that’s a better option,” Costello said.”

Three years earlier an American had written a piece called “This is America. Like it or leave it”

By 2013 the Gillard haters had drawn inspiration from both these examples of xenophobia and put together this rubbish now being emailed round the traps:

Snopes.com