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

When a newspaper sets itself up as a quasi-court meting out punishment

Every so often the Clarence Valley’s largest newspaper catches a bout of righteous indignation and does this:

The Daily Examiner will resume publishing the details of drink drivers who front Grafton and Maclean local courts.

The paper will collate the names, age and town of residence of the offenders, the location, time and date of the offence, the PCA reading and the penalty handed down.

This list will appear in the paper after local court hearings at Grafton or Maclean.*

Obviously ignoring the fact that NSW courts have rightly imposed specific legal penalties (which cannot include further public 'naming and shaming'), it wants to punish drink drivers a second time by further stigmatising the offender and, in the Clarence Valley’s small communities also potentially penalising or socially isolating the now easily identifiable innocent parents, partners, siblings or children of these offenders.

If as suggested His Honour Magistrate David M. Heilpern supports this secondary victimisation of persons not before the court (who quite rightly have an expectation of privacy) then I am seriously disappointed in both the man and his office.

That any community interest in naming and shaming has a less than noble side is shown by this remark by a NSW North Coast resident last year when the Coffs Coast Advocate broached the subject of drink driving:

Who knows we might see some local identities and characters that are our neighbours.

Neither The Daily Examiner nor the magistrate appear to have considered that the newspaper’s actual print edition containing these name and shame reports is replicated on the Internet in perpetuity.

Additionally, I have yet to find any reputable study which demonstrates that naming and shaming drink drivers lowers the NSW drink driving rate or affects which convicted drivers reoffend, so there is no excuse for The Daily Examiner’s latest effort to boost newspaper sales.

I am not alone in believing that a return to primitive responses is no solution. Here is Dr Lauren Rosewarne from the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne:

Drunk drivers, of course, is a much more complicated problem. But to suggest that naming an offender in the paper is the answer is laughable. If a person is stupid enough to drink and drive at any time, let alone repeatedly, they are not someone who makes decisions with any clarity. If the thought of killing oneself or others was not enough to prevent them sticking their key in the ignition in the first place, their name in the paper will hardly guide them better next time.

Rather than serving as a deterrent, the name and shame will simply embarrass those people around the drunk. Humiliating children and parents and spouses. 

* 10 April 2013 issue

Looking back on Tony Abbott

Malcolm Turnbull in The Sydney Morning Herald 7 December 2009:

While a shadow minister, Tony Abbott, was never afraid of speaking bluntly in a manner that was at odds with Coalition policy.

So as I am a humble backbencher I am sure he won't complain if I tell a few home truths about the farce that the Coalition's policy, of lack of policy, on climate change has descended into.

First, lets get this straight. You cannot cut emissions without a cost. To replace dirty coal fired power stations with cleaner gas fired ones, or renewables like wind let alone nuclear power or even coal fired power with carbon capture and storage is all going to cost money.

To get farmers to change the way they manage their land, or plant trees and vegetation all costs money.

Somebody has to pay.

So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, "bullshit." Moreover he knows it…..

Has the Australian small business community stopped listening to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's doom and gloom?

 

It would seem that by the first quarter of 2013 Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s scare tactics may have ceased cutting though when it comes to how people starting new businesses see the economy and their chance of success as they are still registering in high numbers.

 

These are the active Australian Business Numbers in 2013, of which 3,557,412 are individual/sole traders, 1,354,105 are private companies and 513,116 are family partnerships:

 

 

Here are the number of new business numbers registered so far this year, of which 74,574 are individual/sole traders, 24,596 are private companies and 3,578 are family partnerships:  

 

 

This is the number which also registered for the Goods & Services Tax for the first time:

 

Click on tables to enlarge