In which Dame Groan keeps groaning and the bromancer returns ...

 

The pond lived through the first NBN war and is still scarred by the memories. 

Every so often a vulgar youff will still come along, blissfully unaware as they gaze at their phone, and the pond will sit them down, and explain how the onion muncher and a man full of bull, egged on by Murdochians, destroyed the possibility of fast FTTH in the land.

That was the stated aim, as remembered by the ABC way back in 2010 ... Abbott orders Turnbull to demolish NBN.

Eventually when he was put in charge, the man who always managed to produce waffling bullshit produced a cockamamie cocktail of crap designed to appease the Murdochians, enraged at the notion that their ancient business model might be threatened.

The full of bull man, who had more faith in himself than seemed wise, did manage to accomplish his mission, despite his astonishing ineptitude. 

According to the Nine rags, Albanese splashes $3 billion on pre-election NBN upgrades:

Australia’s average fixed broadband download speed is ranked a lowly 82 on Speedtest’s worldwide index, behind Oman and Czechia, and just above Uzbekistan.

While punters had various versions of the sorry history on Reddit, the pond remembers the likes of Akker Dakker and little Timmy Bleagh howling and yowling at the NBN, in the time they had left over from ranting at climate science and light bulbs.

Some things never go away, and so Dame Groan turned up today to groan away in a remarkably short two minute rant, Handing $3bn to NBN Co: is this good value for money? The reality is that the government-funded and owned NBN Co was never a good idea. It has been a commercial disaster.

Will Dame Groan remember who orchestrated the disaster? Will her groaning give credit where credit is due, to the Murdochians, the reptiles of Oz, and assorted Liberal governments? Does she have any shame, or offer an apology, for the way that the reptiles demanded that the NBN be destroyed, and the way that Cockn'bull carried out their orders?

Of course not, the entire feud about fibre v. cockamamie cocktail mix is swept away by the first illustration, NBN technicians carrying out fibre upgrades. Picture: NBN Co

Please ma'am, but why do they need to carry out fibre upgrades? 

Don't look to the groaning for an explanation that in any way connects to reality...

Anthony Albanese has announced that a $3bn equity injection will be made to the NBN so that more than 600,000 premises can be given access to fibre internet connections by 2030. According to him, this is finishing the job.
You don’t even have to be particularly tech savvy to realise the job is never done in these types of cases. The 5G network is clearly breathing down the neck of the NBN, and who knows what’s coming around the corner, including Elon Musk’s Starlink. (When the cables were cut by the Russians, Musk provided Starlink connections to Ukraine to maintain internet access.)
The reality is that the government-funded and owned NBN Co was never a good idea.
In other countries, it was quickly realised that the private sector could provide affordable and adequate internet access to densely populated urbanised areas. The role of the government was to fill the gaps so that everyone could enjoy the benefits of access to the internet. This wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, as some people in remote areas needed to access different technology.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an audio offering, The Front, NBN fight enters a new era, but the pond confesses to not listening. 

Not when Dame Groan manages to deflect, distort, distract, and disremember ...

Many countries used this gap-filling approach, including New Zealand. The net effect has been a much lower burden on the taxpayer as well as adequate internet services in those countries.
It’s worth noting here that the NBN has neither delivered fast internet speeds nor affordable bills. According to Energy Matters, “Australia ranked 60th worldwide for average download speeds in October 2023, with an average speed of 57.9 Mbps (megabits per second)”.
“This is significantly slower than the global average of 97.5 Mbps, and behind many other developed countries, such as Singapore (220 Mbps), South Korea (178.7 Mbps), and New Zealand (119.7 Mbps). Australia also has some of the highest internet prices in the developed world.”

So that's what collective amnesia looks like in the reptile hive mind ... moaning about how fucked the NBN is, when they wanted it fucked and got it fucked ...fucked from the very start, followed by washing of hands and smug William looks, nothing to do with them ...

Then came another distraction, this one an AV offering ...

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says keeping the National Broadband Network in public ownership is “so important”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a funding commitment of $3 billion to the National Broadband Network. “It’s an important part of our economic infrastructure; it’s an important productivity piece to drive access for households,” Ms Gallagher said at a media conference on Monday. “Finishing this job is so important, as is keeping it in public ownership.”

Let's be clear, this entire disaster should be owned by successive Liberal governments and News Corp. 

Unless of course you happen to be reading a groaning ...

Let’s be clear, the NBN has been a commercial disaster. It is accounted for off-budget on the assumption that it would make a return on assets, which it never has. It turns an annual loss.
While the government doesn’t like to use the term “written off”, a large chunk of its equity has been written off.
The only piece of luck was that a great deal of the NBN work was undertaken before construction costs really took off.
It was a complete gimmick for the Labor government to legislate that the NBN should remain in public hands. No investors in their right mind would think of buying it in its current form.
It’s just another case of politics driving out good policy.
Let’s not forget here that a number of Labor politicians were running around arguing that the Future Fund should fund the NBN – it was a project of national importance and it was sure to return well. Or so the likes of Kevin Rudd predicted.
It was another piece of luck that sense prevailed and the Future Fund never became involved.
Had it done so, its impressive results would have been less impressive and it would have been forced to take a substantial haircut on its NBN investment. Of course, in the context of a government that is now spending well over $700bn on-budget each year, $3bn sounds like a small amount of money.
But, as they say, a billion here and a billion there and soon we are talking real money.
As for the “modelled” boost to output of $10bn, this is less than a rounding error over the period to 2030.
The real worry now is that Albanese will be seeking to announce a new spending initiative almost every day in order to remain in government.
Let’s just hope he recalls from his university days that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The pond is lucky this groaning was so short, because if it had been longer, the pond would likely have reverted to copper wire and blown a hybrid fuse ...

The pond had been so angry it realised it hadn't even surveyed the day's front page ...

Oh dear, fancy councils being put off by heat and high costs for the reptile celebration of the day of days. Perhaps they could apply to News Corp for sponsorships ...

And naturally there's a story about the NBN ... while stories about the LA fires have been sent to the reptile cornfield ...

Over on the extreme far right, the pond hadn't checked for any alternatives to the groaning, so it was time to take a squiz ...

Oh dear, the bromancer is back, but he's immediately in to campaign mode. 

There's going to be months of this, but confronted by a choice between Stevo embracing cancer, and the lesser Lesser delivering lines like this ...

...I’ve realised Wong has more than a blind spot about Israel; she has a lack of faith in the values of the West. It’s why when Wong visited London she used the occasion to lecture the British on colonialism, notwithstanding the great British democratic architecture that is the foundation of modern Australia.
Not only did she offend her hosts, she totally played into the Chinese argument that AUKUS is an “Anglo-Saxon clique”. This lack of faith in our shared Western values has meant the Foreign Minister has been consistently and openly hostile to the only democracy in the Middle East.
Since October 7, Wong has continued to instruct her diplomats to vote for one-sided resolutions that put Australia at odds with our most important strategic ally, the US. She has continued to call for premature ceasefires that would leave Hamas in place and able to regroup and rearm, despite more than 100 hostages remaining under its control.

... the pond had no choice but to go with the bromancer and ...Albanese government is one of the worst in foreign policy, The Albanese government provides no rationale or narrative for its disconnected actions. Everything is spin. We’ve seldom seen a government this poor in such critical fields at such a dangerous time.

Shockingly the bromancer must have returned revitalised, because the reptiles began by promising it was a five minute read, and offering a snap...The Albanese government is not the worst since World War II. You can’t take the title from the Whitlam government. Picture: The Australian

Picture:The Australian?! No wonder no human bean wanted a credit.

Before beginning, would it be remiss of the pond to recall the alarming stupidity and adventurism of Ming the merciless and his 'Nam folly? You know, if we're talking about governments managing epic foreign policy failures ...

Of course it would... in the way of reptile lore, that adventure only turned sour because of hippies, beatniks and peaceniks. We coulda won, we shoulda won, we wuz robbed ... just ask prattling Polonius.

Oh wait, at the end of the very first gobbet, the bro does mention 'Nam, only to skip over it...

The Albanese government has emerged as an unmitigated failure, if not outright disaster, in foreign affairs, defence and national security. It’s one of the worst governments we’ve had.
The Australian military is weaker and feebler than when Labor took office. Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles talk big about the future but deliver nothing. Australia’s regional standing has declined sharply. Once we were seen as a powerful country getting stronger; now we’re seen as weak, confused, living off past riches.
Australia has little influence in the Middle East. But the Albanese government, led by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, has failed to identify principles or national interest, so policy is incoherent and ineffective. It has alienated our oldest regional friend, Israel, and joined the opposition to the US at the UN.
The government provides no rationale or narrative for its disconnected actions. Everything is spin, frequently designed to appease Greens voters and the Labor Left. As a result of the government’s moral confusion and lack of political leadership, Australia is gripped by an anti-Semitism crisis the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The government is not remotely anti-Semitic. Its failure in leadership has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, foreign policy is bitterly dividing the community, this time along sectarian, religious and ethnic lines.

It actually isn't the fault of the current government that a genocide is unfolding in Gaza, and some are perturbed at the behaviour of Israel's extreme far right government, led as it is by a deeply corrupt man anxious to say out of the clink. 

Quick, a visual distraction,  An anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in Newtown, Sydney in January. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Bullard.

Shocking, though somehow it doesn't quite match in the pond's mind to dying of hunger or hypothermia or both, while being shuffled hither and yon, trapped in a gulag with bombs raining down ...

Inevitably that snap set the bromancer off on just about everything ...

Everything the government does in foreign affairs and defence is spin and small-P politics. Having told us how much at one he was with the administration of Joe Biden, the Prime Minister, demonstrating that he has kept his sense of humour, claims he is better placed than Peter Dutton to have a good relationship with the incoming Trump administration.
Because in every dimension the government’s record in substance is so poor, it’s utterly obsessed with spin and hypersensitive to any criticism. This is the only explanation of its attempt since it first came into office to intimidate, muzzle and, if possible, more or less destroy the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as we’ve known it.
ASPI was set up by John Howard to give independent analysis on national security, especially defence policy, to provide contestability of policy. Defence documents are designed to be completely impenetrable to any normal person. Typically the only place you can get proper analysis of the defence budget is at ASPI and among some ASPI alumni.
This is always disobliging to a government because resources never match objectives, execution never matches policy, and Australian defence spending is so notoriously inefficient. That’s why you want an independent think tank.
Every government before Albanese accepted this. ASPI’s defence analysis was often extremely disobliging to previous Coalition governments, especially the Morrison government The Albanese government commissioned Peter Varghese, for whom this column has the greatest respect, to produce a report on strategic think tanks. Varghese is a fine servant of Australia but his report has the effect of restoring complete bureaucratic control over what has value only if it’s independent. No modern government in my memory has had such authoritarian instincts, and such a desire not to answer but to close down criticism, as has the Albanese government.

Read that line again, No modern government in my memory has had such authoritarian instincts, and such a desire not to answer but to close down criticism, as has the Albanese government, and laugh or weep as you will, and remember the wars that are being promised ...

Yes, it's already started, the war on woke, and the war on crime, and the war on furriners, and signing up for King Donald's wars, and no doubt a return to the good old days of SloMo's war on China ...

Varghese recommends that ASPI’s funding be extended only for two years and that a fully competitive tender be set up so base funding is renewed every five years, with other organisations invited to bid for that funding. At the same time, funding would be assessed against ASPI meeting priority research guidelines to be set by the public service.
The government presumably believes that with a sword of Damocles hanging constantly over ASPI’s head every five years it will self-censor, cut out critical stuff on the defence budget or any research that might be controversial about China. Thus the value that the Howard government created in ASPI will be destroyed and the already feeble strategic debate will be vastly poorer.

As if to ram home the bro point, the reptiles offered an hagiographic snap of a man who managed to not only lose government, but to lose his own seat, John Howard addresses The Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, in 2007. ASPI was set up by Howard to give independent analysis on national security. Picture: News Corp

Is there an upside? Well it seems that the immortal Rowe has returned to keep score ...

A boofhead with a cricket bat at a game of tennis, on the basis that you never bring fists to a knife fight, though a sledgehammer or a wrench might come in handy.

Oh it's going to be a tedious five sets, full of bromancer rants...

What’s worse, China demanded the government muzzle ASPI. Any Australian government with a skerrick of self-respect would as a result have guaranteed ASPI’s funding for the next 20 years. Just as when Beijing told Howard, as a new prime minister, that he must not meet Tibet’s Dalai Lama, that guaranteed Howard would meet the Dalai Lama. The problem is the Albanese government does not have a skerrick of self-respect. Nor much respect for Australia. It has cravenly bent the knee to Beijing’s bullying over ASPI.
The Albanese government has done nothing creative so far to woo, understand or connect with the incoming Trump administration. Ambassador Kevin Rudd is doing a good job. But when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.

Ah, King Donald I ... there's a Rowe for him too ...

Of course we could offer to help with the invasion of Greenland, and perhaps join in the takeover of Canada, or perhaps simply offer Australia up as the 51st state (it's likely a smaller island or three wouldn't cut it) ...

Sorry, the bro was busy with the war on China ...

The government has two foreign policy successes. It has been energetic in countering Chinese influence in the South Pacific. And it has welcomed the US military into the Australian north so that having given up the effort to have a competent defence force of our own, we hope, as ever, that the Americans will defend us instead.
The government gets no marks over AUKUS because nothing of consequence is happening with AUKUS.

Then came an illustration a bit like the bromancer himself, illustrating three fifths of fuck all, The Australian military is weaker and feebler than when Labor took office. Picture: News Corp

One of the delusions of being Reichsmarschall des GroßOz Reiches in waiting - a situation that the bromancer has suffered for years - is that the syndrome involves a desire to rant, and to offer up solutions ...

The Albanese government is not the worst since World War II. You can’t take the title from the Whitlam government. It nearly destroyed the US alliance. The US, Britain and Canada all cut off intelligence sharing with Australia for a time under Gough Whitlam. Whitlam had a shocking and ugly prejudice against Vietnamese refugees, famously telling his cabinet ministers: “I’m not having those f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political prejudices against us.” Whitlam, for no benefit, extended de jure recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states. Whitlam was regarded as a fool regionally. Lee Kuan Yew is devastating in his treatment of Whitlam in his memoirs, describing him as an arrogant sham. And Whitlam ended his time in office by commissioning Bill Hartley to seek secret electoral funding for the ALP from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Socialist Party in Iraq.
Albanese is not as bad as that. Lest you feel these harsh judgments of mine are excessive, consider the following testimonials. Bilahari Kausikan, former head of the Singapore Foreign Ministry, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently: “Today, the three most important US allies (in Asia) – Australia, Japan and South Korea – all have weak leaders.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, no fevered neo-conservative, recently remarked that those nations that put one-sided pressure on Israel effectively encouraged the terror group Hamas to hold out and not to release Israeli hostages. That’s the effect of Australian policy.
Howard tells this column: “The view that Penny Wong runs foreign policy is right and she’s openly anti-Israel.”

Well it wouldn't do to be anti-genocide, and ethnic cleansing and collective displacement, and can anyone remember when the always blinking Blinken grandly promised, US gives Israel 30 days to boost Gaza aid or risk cut to military support.

That was in October last year, and fast forward to January this year, to read Biden administration notifies Congessof planned $8 billion weapons sale to Israel ...

Pathetic. This we should follow, this we should emulate?

Then after a few words from the lying rodent, the bromancer proposesd a grand new team...

On ASPI, Howard says he strongly disagrees with making core funding subject to tender every five years: “They (the government) are obviously trying to chain it. It’s a threat. If it steps out of line it will be in trouble.”
Dutton must soon replace the effective Simon Birmingham as opposition foreign affairs spokesman. He should keep maximum pressure on this very weak government by appointing his most effective frontbencher, James Paterson, who could keep home affairs as well, or Dan Tehan could take that with immigration.

Wet behind the ears simpleton Simon was "effective", and Jimbo Paterson of the IPA or Dan the man Tehan should replace him?

Credit where credit is due, the bromancer is always good for a laugh, as a way of relieving the tedium and sense of ennui...

In any event, it just shows how hard ducks of the bromancer kind must keep peddling underwater to stay afloat, and to offer a concluding line like this ...

In any event, we’ve seldom seen a government this poor in such critical fields at such a dangerous time.

In any event, we've seldom seen a scribbler this poor in such critical fields at such a dangerous time, but no doubt a ban on lobster and wine sales to China might be achievable in a short months ... as a prelude to the Reichsmarschall's war on tanks, which true to his words, have proven to be singularly useless and irrelevant in Vlad the sociopath's war on Ukraine ...(why does the bromancer always enhance the pond's sense of irony?)

And with that, on the upside, the reptiles going into election mode has precluded them offering up some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds.

 For that you can turn to Tom Tomorrow ...