Angus Taylor, and The Australian maintains its paranoid luddite rage ...

(Above: Joseph Goebbels speaks, using radio, on the night of the Berlin book burning May 10, 1933 - here. Stop press: The Australian uses intertubes low speed broadband to decry the benefits of high speed broadband).

The parade of paranoia continues at The Australian.

What's a respected journalist such as Geraldine Doogue doing in a column like this? asks The Oz's Cut and Paste column, and never you mind that the soft core job of cardigan wearing, presenter and host duties on the ABC's RN's Saturday Extra are suddenly transformed into major matters of respected journalism.

Because you see, Doogue has committed a thought crime offensive to The Oz:

In the past, you didn't have the presence of all the proliferation of media, though, that you've got now, things like Fox News, which really are quite propagandist, such that, you know, you've got whole groups of Americans who don't even think [Barack] Obama was born there. Aren't there some extra dangers at the moment?

Tom Mann: There are indeed. It's quite disconcerting to see the number of untruths that many citizens believe are absolutely facts. And this is reinforced by ideologically oriented media outlets.

Uh huh. A statement of the bleeding obvious. It is disturbing to see how delusional and extreme certain sections of the United States has become, and equally disturbing to see how bizarre talking points about Obama have gained traction, whether they involve birth certificates, Islam, Indonesia, or Kenya (yes, come on down Newt Gingrich).

It makes disinterested observers yearn for the days when Presidents were persecuted for wanting and getting and lying about a blow job (and never mind what Kennedy got up to or down wit').

But what's the thought crime?

Doogue: Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of some of the stuff, I think, that's around at the moment, dare I say?

Eek, a breach of Godwin's Law. Goebbels proud of some of the stuff around at the moment?

Wrong, Doogue. Goebbels would be amazed, astonished, startled and envious at the way Fox News has made the likes of Glenn Beck common currency. Suck it up, The Oz, you're part of an evil empire, close kissing cousins to the News of the World. Live with it ...

Meanwhile, in its desperate daily ongoing rage against the NBN, The Australian shows how propagandist rags go about their business.

The latest manoeuvre? Why it's to wheel out Angus Taylor, scribbling furiously in More to nation building than big bucks, to refute the idle notion that the NBN might be compared to the Snowy scheme.

And the basis for the piece? Well it turns out that the head of the Snowy scheme was Taylor's grandfather ...

So what follows is a kind of rhapsody about delivering electricity to Sydney and saving the city from black outs, and so delivering "clear and tangible benefits to the consumers and farmers."

Yep, that's the trouble with all this new age, new fangled, 'in the ether' digital stuff. It's just not tangible or clear. It's so bloody geeky. Unlike electricity, you can't grab hold of it in both hands, and demonstrate clear and tangible benefits, or even the potent effects of a short.

Uh huh.

The widespread understanding of the benefits built community support for the scheme, resulting in cross-party support.

Uh huh. But the NBN has cross-party support. It has a half baked cheap assed $2 store bargain basement version offered up by the coalition, and a full blown full quid offering from the Labor party. As the client said to the hooker, there's no discussion about whether the hooker's a hooker. The argument's only about the price ...

So far, the promoters of the NBN have struggled to paint a picture of benefits that are palpable, and don't need to be imagined. The McKinsey-KPMG implementation study did not set out to demonstrate benefits. Without real understanding of what internet speed of 100 megabits per second or more delivers, public interest will not be held for very long.

Uh huh. So that's why The Australian can spend its days not analysing real and possible benefits, but instead pissing on the NBN from a great height.

But is this an argument about what broadband might deliver, or an argument against the kind of dissembling and outright ignorance being peddled in The Australian, which naturally means the public interest lacks real understanding and isn't being held for very long?

It usually involves dragging out the red herring that it'll only be useful for gaming and watching movies:

The present picture of tangible benefits is limited to applications with narrow appeal, such as gaming, videoconferencing and e-health.

Oh dear. Just gaming? What about movies? Well I guess e-health being of narrow appeal isn't a bad ringer.

In much the same way presumably that e-education is of narrow appeal. In much the same way that all the current offerings of the full to overflowing intertubes are of narrow appeal, and not imagined only a decade ago. Google Maps, for example, started in 2005, and only five years later I was being guided by phone through the wilds of Newcastle ...

The trouble of course with negative dreaming, and looking back to the wild days of electricity, and the Snowy, is that at the same time you handily avoid looking forward, and all you can imagine are the things that are in front of you. This is such a sublimely unimaginative form of ignorance, as peddled daily in The Australian, that it explains why Australia lags so badly in terms of innovative ability in relation to the interweb, which is now the de facto ribbon that links the world.

I could, for example, rabbit on about the memory of my grandparents first switching on electricity (well they did live in the extreme bush), and marvel at how I've seen meat safes, ice chests and kerosene fridges and now full two door Seinfeld style fridges, and be amazed at how you could pick up shortwave on the battery powered wireless in the lounge room, and so listen to the voice of America while living in woop woop.

No doubt all amazing transformations, but as soon as you start explaining how broadband doesn't cut it, I get thoroughly amazed.

(Arguably the last does not need anything like the full NBN.) Even if a rigorous cost-benefit analysis is completed (as it should be), the challenge is to demonstrate benefits as vivid and far reaching as those of the Snowy.

Vivid and far reaching? How about the death of the newspaper?

Would that do for a start? How about the death, or at least the transformation and transubstantiation of that wretched rag The Australian? And the rest of Murdoch's down at heel empire?

Listen to what you're scribbling! You mean you haven't noticed how the internet and broadband have grown apace in the last decade and transformed the world of communications? Not to mention giving other industries, such as movies and music, heartburn? Not to mention the far reaching prospects in every area of human interaction? Right now I'm skyping with nearest and dearest in far away portals, and who knows how we might be skyping and grokking in the near future ...

If you won't buy the Snowy River comparison, how about the wild excitement that followed the connection of urban hubs in Australia to the world via the Overland Telegraph?

Do you think that Geoffrey Blainey could these days make a career as a historian by scribbling The Tyranny of Distance?

...the legacy of the Overland Telegraph, an engineering feat that conquered the tyranny of distance and ended Australia's isolation from the world, remains.

No line passing through a similar extent of uninhabited country, where the materials had to be carted over such long distances, no line of equal length and presenting similar natural obstacles, has been constructed in the same short space of time.
Charles Todd, 1870.

They must be bears with limited vision and imagination, the bears that work for Port Jackson Partners Limited.

But then it gets worse, as Taylor clutches at straws, and blathers on about the way immigrants worked on the Snowy. As if Australia and Europe - coming off the upheaval of World War Two - are somehow comparable in terms of workforce description in 2010:

There is no sense in which the NBN is seeking to bring together a diverse group of people united with a common purpose. Perhaps this is asking too much.

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is an entirely stupid and irrelevant point, though after watching the way they were rolling out broadband in Shanghai to produce a totally wired and connected city (not to mention an excellent metro scheme), it does occur to me that we could bring in the Chinese to build broadband, and perhaps some fast trains, and perhaps a metro system.

Never mind. Here's the ignoratio elenchi capper:

However, it is ironic that the same politicians who are hailing the nation-building benefits of the Snowy are also posturing about limits on immigration and appear blind to looming skill shortages.

Phew. So we are agreed we should import Chinese workers.

And then finally, since Taylor seems to have quickly run out of puff on the vision thing, and the technical thing, and an actual understanding of the interweb and uses of speed which might assist in new applications, it's time for a detour in to industrial relations:

Third, the Snowy was innovative in industrial relations, contracting and what we now call organisation design. While it was unionised, nearly all the individual projects were tendered to private-sector companies from Australia and offshore, using innovative contracts with performance incentives.

But what on earth does this have to do with dissing the implications of national broadband connectivity? Whether at half baked half assed coalition prices or at Labor's full on pricing?

Now it's suddenly become an argument about the ways and means it might be done, rather than the thing itself, with Taylor not seeming to understand that industrial relations have moved along a little since the Snowy days.

How to end this kind of rambling illogical piece? Why surely it needs a little rhetorical flourish:

A government-run infrastructure project costing tens of billions of dollars doesn't automatically qualify as nation building. The difference comes down to leadership and execution: substance, not spin. The recent rollout of federal government programs provides little reason for optimism. To achieve Snowy-like outcomes, the NBN will need to throw away this government's rule book. Unless it does, attempts to draw a parallel with the Snowy scheme should invite scepticism.

Uh huh. So if the NBN throws away the government's rule book, it could become a visionary thing, and achieve Snowy-like outcomes, and if it does that, it will be able to draw a parallel with the Snowy scheme without inviting scepticism.

Or blather to that effect.

By golly, between paranoia and maintaining a propagandist rage in relation to the NBN, The Australian is hitting new lows on a daily basis ...

Roll on the roll out of high speed broadband, and with it the death of newspapers ... And the sooner the better ...

Let's see if paywalls can save these doodlers delivering up their scribbles to the digerati ...

At least one thing's certain. If Josef Goebbels were around today, he'd be excited by broadband ... and virtual highways ... seeing as how the Führer was so excited by the connectivity offered by concrete autobahns and volks wagons ...

(Below: the overland telegraph. It only takes a few wires to roll back the tyranny of distance, and understand the power of being connected, and help luddites grasp the vision thingie).