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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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