Australia Liberal/National government voted out | Hacker News Reader

Australia Liberal/National government voted out

abc.net.au

36 pointssmcleod19 comments

Great news for the Australian Government. Independents are representing more of the composition and will enable Labor to push harder on an ICAC and Climate Change.

For example, Labor's NBN original proposal would have been great. However, after the Liberal party gained power, Fibre NBN was reduced to a Mixed Technology Model where Fibre and 40 year old copper lines would be used in conjunction. Completely shortsighted and has been plagued with issues.

There's speculation that Rupert Murdoch campaigned to kill Fibre internet so that Netflix and platforms couldn't eat into his services such as Foxtel. Decisions like this have become completely normalised. Business moguls (or "mates") are constantly put before good policy.

Now, Australia has recorded its worst ever score on a key measure of corruption after a long-term decline equal to that of authoritarian Hungary.

This new government is a welcomed change!

Unclear to me how this plays out in technology space. Remember that Labor had a confused policy on internet regulation when last in power, and stuffed up the NBN proposal in part because of union scepticism of banking support for structural separation of telstra, the national carrier.

I doubt Labor will reverse five eyes, or anti Huawei policy, or even stand up to disneyfication of content, or a host of problems.

The CSIRO will need a massive cluestick hit, to walk back from some disastrous policy shifts like dropping selinux for ...crypto bullshit.

They should be stronger on EV and r&d investment, and in education investment. I doubt they will be much different on FAANG.

My comments about the NBN noted, they will probably put funds into more fibre for the national network.

It was Labour that proposed fibre to the home and started rolling it out.

It was the liberal party that stuffed up and had the confusing stance the NBN with stopping rollouts of fibre and saying that copper was a better technology - they wasted a lot of money on this and it's now having to all be ripped out.

Yes, but you're ignoring the proceeding ten years of fudging on internet policy. Have you forgotten senator Conroy?

We'd have had FTTP if Labor hadn't stuffed up structural separation before the NBN debacle took off. If they'd not blocked splitting telstra wholesale from retail, we'd have had a single natonal agency running pits, poles, wires and fibre before it became electoral fodder.

According to this article, Telstra, not Labor, is responsible for sabotaging the original NBN project.

https://www.afr.com/companies/telecommunications/row-intensi...

According to this article, the LNP coalition were the cause of the subsequent abandonment of FTTP:

https://delimiter.com.au/2013/09/07/fttp-dream-coalition-vic...

Telstra was empowered and emboldened to sabotage because Labor was scared of taking it on. Because the union movement was sceptical of the outcome, and because the banking and finance sectors wanted to do it, which made Labor scared there was a hidden trap. De-mutualisation of electricity, telephony was hugely politicised.

As it was, telstra was paid $11b for the transfer of its pits and some customer access network exchange infrastructure to the NBN and had paused maintenance so much, significant amounts of asset had fallen into disrepair.

None of what you've stated changes the fact that the original plan for fibre-to-the-premises was derailed by the incoming coalition government under Abbott & Turnbull.

No. This is completely true. I'd far rather we had labor's fttp majority NBN than turnbulls MTM.

The whole NBN thing was such a mess on both sides, from what I recall (I'm a resident, not a citizen).

CSIRO has been turned into a consulting company. I'm former NICTA/CSIRO/Data61, and I believe it will be a huge task to get that organization back on the right track.

There's almost no way anyone is getting out of Five Eyes.

Totally with you on EV. Though I think there is enough public interest that the capital is there to do it without a ton of government support.

R&D investment I've always found quite good, but we're now in health tech, which is a sector Australia supports.

What’s the argument against an anti-Huawei policy? The most common counter argument I’ve heard is “American companies can’t be trusted either” which is true! But not a rebuttal!

That's not even close to a true statement, Australia can trust USA far more than they can trust China. Its not binary.

I agree that it’s a false equivalence- but even if you treated the two cases as equivalent, it’s still not a good rebuttal.

Possibly of interest to US folk, locally we had coal billionare Clive Palmers “United Australia Party”. The “party” was more of a marketing machine to stand against strong climate policy by taking a public position that tapped into anti-vax anti-government sentitment and ran on a tagline of “FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM”.

Clive carpet bomb the Election with paid ads, daily buying ads on the cover as well as multiple full page spreads within each daily paper not to mention YouTube ads. Spending in some seats more than 200x the next candidate and drawing much inspiration from Trump 2016 tactics, but he’s so far failed to land even one seat lower or upper house.

Australia is a significant coal producer and the outgoing conservative government quietly had much alignment with Clive and the other Australian coal barrons despite weak public claims they were unaligned.

The Green party, who didn't bombard me with text messaging spam, managed to eke out a seat in traditionally conservative Queensland, with two more possibly to come.

It is clear that climate change was a big issue with many voters, perhaps unsurprisingly given the bushfires, floods and generally miserable summers we've been having. This was particularly interesting because neither major party really went hard on climate this time round, thus leaving a vacuum that was filled by third parties and independents

Surprised nobody here mentions the absolutely draconian anti-COVID measures of the former Australian government. I hope this change of leadership bodes well for the civil liberties of the Aussies.

They weren't more draconian than plenty of other countries, including parts of the U.S. They were just kept in place for longer, as they were effective at keeping case/fatality numbers low until vaccination levels were high.

But more to your point, the federal government that has just been voted out was centre-right/conservative, and was unsupportive of many of the pandemic management policies implemented by the states, most of which are governed by the centre-left Labor party. In certain Labor-governed states, e.g., Victoria and Western Australia, this election result can be seen as a repudiation of the unsupportive behaviour of the conservative federal government towards the pandemic response, and an affirmation of the states' policies, which saved many lives whilst also keeping their economies running quite well.

In fairness, the federal government played a positive role through income support, business support, and other stimulus measures, but their propensity to use pandemic measures to seek to achieve political advantage when citizens were struggling and fearful has played a significant role in this election loss.

The strict lockdowns and border closures were state-level policies, not of the federal government which was just voted out

When they called the election it didn't look like they were going to win. They probably saw it as 'better to lose now, than lose worse later'

The Liberals likely conceded as soon as Western Australia's numbers started to come in, which were very very bad for the LNP. Not to mention all the "safe" Liberal seats (including that of the Treasurer's) that fell to Independents.

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