A massive slump in government revenue?
A huge hole has opened up in the federal governments revenue stream. Revenue next financial year will be reduced to just $290 billion. The government hasn’t had to operate on such a lean amount of revenue for many years. Three in fact. Yes despite the rhetoric federal government revenue in 2009-10 will still be higher than it was in 2006-07. And 2006-07 was at the time a record high for revenue. It’s all in table C1.
100 Megabits
One of Kevin Rudd’s main goals is to implement a blazingly fast nation-wide 100Mb/s national broadband network, at a cost of around $43b. This would place Australia at the pinnacle of world broadband networks.
Frankly, I can’t think of a single bigger waste of tax-payer’s money than this (especially when we are due to run huge deficits). After all, what does one use 100Mb/s for? Movies, music and porn – that’s it. I’m a fairly heavy internet user, yet I can’t for the life of me think how I would use anywhere near 100Mb/s. You don’t need 100Mb/s to check your email. You don’t need 100Mb/s to do research for your high school essay. You don’t need 100Mb/s to chat to your Mum over Skype. All you need it for is BitTorrent. Should the government really be spending several tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money on subsidizing BitTorrent? I don’t think so – especially given that governments around the world are spending billions of dollars trying to fight copyright infringement. It would be much more cost effective to subsidize rental video outlets and adult stores, which would have the same effect for a fraction of the cost.
I see two possibilities for how this scheme could develop. First, given that it is estimated that use of the network by the end user will cost around $200/month, there is a very real possibility that few people will want to pay the price to use it, in which case the resources will have been wasted. Alternately, lots of people might start using the network for its speed which will put private sector ISPs out of business, since they will be unable to compete against this newly created, heavily subsidized behemoth. This could have devastating implications for the telecommunications industry and might effectively socialize this critical sector of the economy. Either of these possibilities is undesirable.
In Australia, like in other developed countries, the market has proven very effective at providing broadband services to our residents. If a 100Mb/s network hasn’t already developed in the market, this is probably a fairly good indication that such a network would be economically unviable and therefore shouldn’t be pursued by the government.
This post has been cross-posted at Peter Rohde’s blog.
Climate change movies
This year is still shaping up to be an interesting one for climate change debate (alarmists v denialists). The introduction of an Australian ETS has been delayed from 2010 until 2011… but the legislation is still going to parliament this year and it remains controversial with some people demanding more action and some people demanding less action.
In recent weeks the Ian Plimer book (Heaven & Earth) seems to have gotten a lot of people excited or angry. Plimer represents the “humans aren’t to blame” faction in the debate. My position is closer to Bjorn Lomborg and the CATO climatologist Pat Michaels, who accept the mainstream science story but suggest that it isn’t a big problem. Hopefully Michaels will be in Australia later in the year to give his views on the world and contribute to the ongoing debate.
But for those who prefer to watch videos rather than read books, there are a few other contributions coming soon. From the directors of “Mine Your Own Business“, we have a documentary called “Not Evil Just Wrong” which looks at global warming hysteria. Or if you prefer talking about clouds there is “The Cloud Mystery” which looks at the work of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and others (Nir Shaviv, Jan Veizer, Richard Turco) into the impact of clouds on the climate.
Whatever happens, it looks like this argument will be going on for a while to come…
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