By Ian Yates
15 May 2008 06:41AM
Tags: budget

Well, after perusing the latest offerings in the Federal Budget, we are not amused. Yeah, OK, they had to cough up the pre-election bribe of $31 billion in tax cuts, even though they are so paltry you couldn't buy a healthy lunch each day with the weekly savings. Too bad neither side had the gumption before the poll to take a punt on building a 21st century technology-based nation instead of extending the pork barrelling to every pay packet. Just for a few minutes, pause and think what could be done for the state of our broadband with $31bn. Staggering isn't it?

Instead, we're going to squirrel away some $40 billion for future infrastructure things, which we'll be deciding on sometime down the track, oh, let me see now, around about the time of the next election. Obviously the new gang learned some tricks from the old gang. Don't worry about the nation, just worry about getting elected every three years. And in three years, if we still don't have a fibre backbone across the country, guess where we're going to be ranked world wide? Yep. Right down there below even the developing nations.

But hey, we've got lots of coal and iron ore! Who needs the Internet! Who needs technology? Other than enough tech to keep the computerised mining machines going of course. Heck, why don't we just shutdown all the high schools and universities and send the kids straight down the mines after they graduate from year six? That should save an absolute fortune and get the minerals out of the ground even faster, then the government can make an absolute motza surplus, and easily be able to afford lots of new highways and railways….for the dump trucks.

So much for the clever country. We started out riding on the sheep's back, and they've never been noted for their high-level smarts, and now we're riding on the back of a quarry truck. Not exactly a high-tech upgrade from the old sheep days. That's not likely to inspire our young folk to study hard enough to get through university. But never mind, we'll probably win lots of medals in the swimming pool in Beijing.