And the internet won it....Follow

The Aussie recent election returned no majority to either main party. 4 Independents and a single Green were elected to the Lower House, holding the balance of power. To form a minority government, each main party had to do a deal with at least 3 of the Independents that they would vote with them on issues of "Supply" so that the new government could pay its Executive bills. The Green and three of the independents finally went with Labour after a little over 2 weeks of deliberations and meetings. So we have a minority Labour Government in.


What is vaguely interesting to me is that two of the Independents that finally supported giving Supply to Labour actually split off from the other main party a few years ago. (The National Party section of the National/Liberal Coalition Party) Those two Independants both represent rural seats and are generally conservative in outlook. But the deciding factor for them to support their natural enemies the progressive Labour party into minority government, is that Labour had just started to build the National Broadband Network. The NBN is designed to put fibre-optic to the door of 90% of Australian homes, including in rural, sparsly populated areas. The NBN will cost about $43 billion dollars, I think.

The opposition National/Liberal Coalition wants to abandon the newly started NBN and leave internet infrastructure development to private business.

Australia is not in recession, our unemployment rate is 5.1%, our growth rate I think is just under 5%, and our Cash rate (base interest rate set by the government owned Reserve bank) is about 5%... although I'm not 100% sure about that.

Our government is in debt after having to stimulate the economy after the GFC, but both parties will get the government back into profit in 2012 or 2013.

We had a hung parliament, and the NBN tipped it. The conservatives think that spending $43 on a government built monopoly is a horrific White Elephant. The idea is that government will own the NBN like a wholesale merchant. Private telephony/net services will use and sell package deals to customers like Retail merchants. The progressives think that Fibre-optics are the best solution "Railway of the 21st Century", that there's no sense in overlapping networks, and that only 20% of Australia's land surface, where 80% of us live, would ever get decent coverage if we left it up to private business, since private business very logically wouldn't cover high-cost, low-return rural areas that make up most of our land surface.

It is true, that for Australia, which only has 20 million people, $43 billion is a HUGE amount of money. That's roughly $2,150 for every Australian citizen, and not all of us pay tax, what with all the elderly, children and poor. So it's more like $6-10k per tax payer for world-class internet for most of the nation. (The other 10% make do with wireless).

Australia has only 20 million people? Damn, New York State alone is about 20 mil.

Must be nice having a multiparty political system.

Not always that nice.
Belgians have so many parties that to form a government they always have to work with some 5-7 parties which is always drama filled and seems to take about half a year.
And for The Netherlands, we've had an outcome from the elections that makes it very very hard to make a government out of it and there's been drama for the past 3 months and I highly doubt that the resulting government (If there even will be one to start with) will last more than a month or two.