I will consider here only those successes related to the IT field, since Turnbull is considered by some to be an IT genius who brought the Internet to Australia (he bought shares in the now-defunct Ozemail and sold them a few years later at a massive profit).
To the uninitiated, it might seem that his actual performance has been more like a three-train wreck; that is to say, not only a disaster, but something where you marvel at how it's physically possibly for it to have happened.
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| [Based on an illustration from here] |
But looking at it from the point of view of the Coalition, it has been instead a series of mighty victories.
Victory 1: The NBN
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[Based on a stock photo from here] |
There is no question that the wrecking of the NBN was deliberate.
Turnbull's FTTN (Fibre-to-the-node) network is inferior to Labor's FTTP (Fibre-to-the-premises) system in every conceivable way. It costs just as much to install, but is orders of magnitude slower, it's not upgradable, it won't last as long, it's much less reliable and it has enormous ongoing operating costs. The technical community - despite an intrinsic right-wing bias - are uniformly against it. Have a look the Whirlpool forum to see what I mean; whenever a Coalition troll ventures in to spruik Turnbull's FTTN, they are immediately shot down with technical arguments by experts in the field.
Not only is this obvious now, but it was obvious right from the start.
Soon after gaining office in 2007, the ALP's original proposal for the NBN was actually something very much like Turnbull's FTTN network. At the time, the Coalition correctly called it out as useless. The term "Fraudband" was actually coined by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash to describe this network.
So the Coalition knew, nearly 10 years ago, that FTTN was a dud.
So how come they ended up in favour of it?
It seems that just before the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott had a luncheon with his master Rupert Murdoch, whose influence and profits were being threatened by expanding Internet usage.
The very next day Abbott rashly announced that he would destroy the NBN.
I think he was then quickly taken aside and given a stern talking to by his handler Peta Credlin ("Not like that you fool, the NBN is popular; you need to destroy it by stealth"). He therefore entrusted this unpopular task to his main rival, Malcolm Turnbull. I think he expected Turnbull to fail, or at least come out of it looking bad.
Turnbull, however, exerted his lying skills to their fullest. He first proposed a wireless system as an alternative to Labor's NBN, and when that was laughed down, he then went with FTTN. He had a plan fully costed and worked out, he said, and ready to go the moment they won government. It would be a third of the price of Labor's system and would be finished much sooner. Their 2013 pre-election promise was for everyone to be connected by 2016.
The technical community saw through these lies at once (although some took a bit longer), but the Coalition had all of the mainstream media on their side. All of the traditional media stood to lose out as the Internet expanded, so they made sure to stifle any objections to the plan.
Now we can see how things turned out. Nowhere near finished, abysmal speed and reliability, $20B over budget so far; all as predicted. Last time I checked, Australia had dropped to 60th in the world in Internet speed. An appalling thing for a first world country.
In other words, it all happened exactly as planned and is a big victory to the Coalition. Those responsible for getting the Coalition into power - the mainstream media, and in particular Rupert Murdoch - have their influence and profits preserved for a little longer. Meanwhile, the NBN has been crippled to the extent of becoming a burden to the taxpayer, so no one will complain when it's given away to Telstra, to further cement their monopoly position.
What is the betting we'll see some Coalition politicians offered well-paid positions on the Telstra board when they lose their seats next election?
Victory 2: The 2016 Census
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| In 2016 there was a sudden increase in the number of people named Winston Smith in Australia [won't reveal the source of this one ;)] |
The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) gathers statistical data on the nation. Reliable data is critical for running the country. If you are distributing resources, you need to know what resources you have and who needs them. If you are implementing a policy, you need to have some feedback on whether it's achieving its goals.
However, since the Coalition came to power in 2013, they haven't had any use for objective data. The decisions they have made have been based on a mixture of ideology and implementing the requests of their corporate sponsors. The problem with having objective data available is that it might contradict these decisions, and in that case there's the need to go through the tiresome process of suppressing the data, censoring or discrediting anyone who publicises it and so on.
Of course it's theoretically possible that, by chance, objective data might support their decisions, but why risk it? Far better to just invent the data as you need to; it's quicker and cheaper to do and always gives the right answer.
Therefore, in 2014, the Coalition made crippling budget cuts to the ABS. These came on top of a previous set of crippling budget cuts by the previous Labor government (who I am by no means defending as they were probably inspired by the same motives).
Things got so dire that when Brian Pink retired as Chief Statistician in January of 2014, they couldn't find anyone to replace him and the department struggled on without a head for several months. But then things got worse: the Coalition appointed David Kalisch as Chief Statistician. Now I don't know for sure that Kalisch is any more than a useful idiot, but there is some reason to believe he's a coalition stooge.
Firstly, Kalisch isn't even a statistician. He is an economist, which these days means someone whose role is to think up reasons why money should taken from the poor and given to the rich. Therefore it would be fair enough to assume that he at least sides with the Coalition politically.
Of interest is that the fact that his appointment was rushed through, along with a number of other partisan appointments, just before Christmas in 2014 - which is a traditional time of year to hide shenanigans.
In February of 2015, he was already spin-doctoring unemployment figures in the government's favour.
Soon afterwards, he was delivering the line that the 2016 census should be scrapped. Given that the census is critically important to the role of the ABS this would seem a very strange thing to say - although not so strange if he was testing the waters on behalf of the coalition.
There was some backlash about this and he was forced to change his tune. Then some Machiavellian plotter (I would like to know who) came up with a quite ingenious strategy: They would announce that, unlike previous years, the ABS would be retaining people's names for data matching purposes.
On the face of it, this didn't make any sense; why expand the scope of the census immediately after you've claimed there wasn't enough money to even hold it at all. Therefore there was much speculation that the motives were entirely sinister. Hitler used the German census data to track down Jews. More recently, the United States used census data to track down Muslims. With those on the left already nervous (if not terrified) about abuses of power by the Coalition there was therefore considerable outcry about this.
This was all part of the plan.
Either no one would care very much and people would fill out their census forms dutifully, thus giving the Coalition a treasure trove of data to use against its enemies, or there would be mass disobedience, which would render the census useless. Either way they would win.
Then came the online census debacle.
Before this happened, I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. I had heard some people saying the encryption on the ABS server wasn't up to scratch. It's never a good idea to take rumours like this at face value, so I checked myself and it turned out they were right. Specifically; I ran an SSL security check on the ABS server and found the encryption protocols available did not provide Forward Secrecy. Forward Secrecy is something you particularly want with something like a census and it's not difficult to set up.
At the time, even my own personal Possum TV server provided Forward Secrecy. [And I'm not trying to make myself out to be a security guru here; if you can set up a server, it's really not rocket science to configure the encryption right. Literally all I did was Google something like "best SSL configuration for Apache" and followed the instructions on the first (trustworthy) site I found.]
When it came to the actual night of the census, things went worse than even I had thought possible. I have looked at a submission by the ABS to the senate enquiry on this embarrassing business, and despite spinning everything in the ABS's favour, it was still obvious that they were totally unprepared and flew into a flailing panic when things started to go wrong.
After the event, Turnbull beat his chest talking about how he would bring those responsible to account. Still waiting on that. Maybe he should look in a mirror.
Victory 3: Centrelink "debt" recovery
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| Centrelink's sensitive and understanding robo-debt-collectors [source] |
Words fail me when it comes to describing what a mess they've made of this; it makes even the census debacle look good by comparison. It's like they sent the intern to a short course on whatever retarded programming language they use there, probably COBOL, and asked him write a data matching program, with no oversight, then rolled it out with no testing and met all complaints with the unanswerable "The computer is always right".
However, to say that this incredible debacle is an unintended consequence of cost-cutting is wrong, and to think that it is hurting the Coalition is also wrong. I believe this is all deliberate and the Coalition is benefiting from it.
The people who are upset about this are people who would never vote for the Coalition anyway.
The Coalition is more interested in winning back voters who have deserted it for lunatic Fascist parties like One Nation. The average One Nation voter most probably considers those on welfare to be scum who should be put against a wall and shot. The idea of welfare recipients being mistreated is music to their ears.
The Coalition want this to hurt people. They need it to be unfair, and be seen to be unfair. The more the progressives scream about how evil and stupid it is, the more the One Nationists like it and the more the Coalition knows they are doing the right thing (at least for a certain value of "right").
The Overall Strategy
There is a common theme to all of these victories. They all involve interfering with, and under-funding, key public services to the extent that they become incapable of performing their roles, ultimately leading to spectacular failures.
Quite apart from the benefits to the Coalition listed above, these victories all have some additional benefits in common:
Firstly, the Coalition gets seen to be prudent economic managers because they are "willing to make the tough decisions" to save money. It's true the NBN disaster is costing enormous amounts of extra money, but since the NBN was originally a Labor initiative this can be blamed on Labor.
Secondly, these sort of things get progressives really riled up, thus taking the focus off other extremely important problems - such as the Coalition's bitter and relentless war against the environment and the crimes against humanity being committed in the refugee death camps.
Thirdly - and I think this is the most important reason - it opens the way for privatisation. Noam Chomsky summed up this strategy in a 2011 speech:
"That's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."I'm not sure what their ultimate aim is; possibly some Libertarian paradise where the only government services remaining are the police and military. In which case, future generations will think Orwell's 1984 was a historical novel, and will marvel at how good people had it back then.
Let's hope the in-fighting between the many crazies in the Coalition (e.g. that dickhead Bernardi who somehow thinks there's a need for yet another reactionary fringe party: The "Australian Majority Party". Off to a good start there, idiot - even the name is a lie.) prevent them from achieving this.
