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January 31, 2011
The political year is in swing and the partisan rhetoric from the political noise machines is being cranked up. The blustering Nationals continue to denounce the Gillard Government for its failure to adopt the politics of austerity whilst continuing to hammer the government by demanding more handouts for regional Australia. Hammer hammer hammer.
Behind the ever increasing noise the tactic looks as if the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott is only going to amplify his style of opposing everything to make life for the government as tough as possible. The Coalition's belief is that the fall of Gillard is inevitable.
The strategy is for Abbott to be prime minister by the end of this year without facing an election and so the Coalition will make the life of the regional Independents---Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor--- as difficult as possible. Destroy them and the Gillard Government falls. Hammer, hammer hammer. Labor throws environmental programs overboard when the going gets tough in order to save its bacon.
We'd better get used to the noise about the incompetent, hopeless, useless Gillard Government, because there is going to be plenty of it. For instance in The Australian Mirko Bagaric, a professor at Deakin University, runs through the right wing talking points:
The only sound response to the flood damage is to defer or scrap other spending programs, especially non-essential items such as the National Broadband Network...the flood impost is exactly what you would expect from a government that has lost its way. One thing that is clear is that for the country to move forward for the benefit of working families, a fundamental shift is necessary in the approach to government policy delivery. That is not likely to happen under Gillard's stewardship.
The rhetoric around the NBN from the conservative noise machine is becoming ever more extreme as it goes way beyond the standard concerns about the internet. Bagaric adds that:
Gillard's only big-ticket item, the NBN, highlights her inadequacies. Governments should never use our taxes for projects that they can't prove will be good for us.It is not clear whether the internet is doing more harm than good to the human species. But what is incontestable is that it is a luxury, and that it is quick enough at present to accommodate all useful applications.Sure, the internet provides quicker access to information, but it has several disadvantages, many of which are just starting to emerge.
These are: most internet use relates to email, (anti-)social networking sites and trash searches, including music videos and porn; it is retrograde from a work and health perspective since online technologies make workers contactable 24/7, breaking the separation between work and family and social life; there are no positive educational outcomes as research suggests the internet is probably making us dumber etc etc.
What we have is an academic opposing an information economy and recycling old work. Bagariuc concludes on this note:
Gillard's persistence with her fanatical plan force us to pay $2000 each to improve a tool that makes us more stressed, dumber, fatter and less healthy is the ultimate proof that she is incapable of making decisions that have positive outcomes in the real world.
I presume that Bagariuc used the internet to send his opinion piece to The Australian to be published, and he is quite happy for us to read his pearls of wisdom online using the internet. The contradictions don't matter, do they? It's just hammer hammer hammer.
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'It is not clear whether the internet is doing more harm than good to the human species. But what is incontestable is that it is a luxury ...'
It's staggering that someone could be allowed to write such nonsense in a commercial newspaper. The absence of understanding and historical awareness is simply stunning; no doubt people wrote the same kind of deluded rubbish about cars, electricity and telephones.
Nation Review Online's proud motto is something like 'standing in the path of history crying "STOP"'. 'The Australian' seems determined to do the same thing, presumably to defer its own inevitable decline into irrelevance.