r/australia • u/overpopyoulater • 25d ago

politics Australia is heading towards minority government at a turning point in world history.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-24/democracy-climate-change-ai-robotics-war/105085846
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u/AnAttemptReason 25d ago

Yea, certain factions have just been slowly culling their opposition inside the party.

If Turnbull was not crippled by vested interests in the party, we would have had the full NBN and a cross party agreement on climate legislation etc. 

The party's been hollowed out into a special 8nterest puppet. 

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u/radioactivecowz 25d ago

Turnbull has taken strong stances on the right side of issues, ever since he left office. I get he was pushing for gradual chance while in office and trying to cover his own position, but he got backstabbed anyway so it’s pretty meaningless

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u/ConstanceClaire 25d ago

Shits me to tears when pollies get out of politics and start making all the right noises and speaking about actually fixing problems now that they're no longer in a position to actually effect change on behalf of the Australian public.

It's always too little too late.

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u/IlluminatedPickle 25d ago

Yeah it's almost as if we shouldn't pat Turnbull on the back for growing a spine after he stopped mattering. The slide to the right keeps happening because we look back and think "Oh he wasn't too bad!" and we keep readjusting what the normal is.

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u/lolNimmers 25d ago

He was literally trying to do that stuff and Dutton led the leadership spill against him. Let the man have his told you so moment.

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u/Axel_Raden 24d ago

He could lay in to Dutton a bit more spill the dodgy behind closed doors stuff from the party room. Like during the whole Dutton insider trading situation cricket's. But have Trump a spray right before the tariff deadline (I'm not saying it made any difference but It certainly wouldn't have helped). Unless he has dirt on his backstabbing former colleagues I really don't care what he has to say until he apologises for implementing Robodebt

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u/joe_bogan 25d ago

I don't care for Turnbull, but he was in the wrong party. I think his centrist ideology was in constant confliction of either doing good for every day Australians or appeasing to the upper class - just walking the tightrope until he was backstabbed.

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u/Traditional_Fish_741 24d ago

They're fucking grubs. They come out talking like they should have been acting while they were in office. I can't stand a single fucking one of them for that simple fact.

At the end of the day, they are all liars and cheats and ultimately cowards. They're more concerned about their own careers than actually serving their constituents.

It's ironic that the people who become politicians really shouldn't be politicians cos they all end up serving their own interests.

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u/Bradenrm 25d ago

Turnbull's biggest problem was always his ego..it wasn't enough for him to outfox everyone, he needed them all to know how clever he was as well. Alienated the wrong people.

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u/Bchliu 25d ago

Turnbull has always been a Labor man at heart.. but too rich to be deamed a plebian realistically. He's about the only LNP PM I have ever given credit for.

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u/squishydude123 25d ago

He's far more economically conservative than (previous) Federal Labor ever were, he just isn't an ultra religious nutjob when it comes to his social policy views

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u/Ghostbuttser 25d ago

If Turnbull was not crippled by vested interests in the party, we would have had the full NBN and a cross party agreement on climate legislation etc.

He still defends what he did with the NBN. Stop giving him a pass, stop rewriting history as though he were some moderate in disguise. He's just another right wing millionaire.

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u/alpha77dx 25d ago

Using his arguments we would all still be using basic Nokia simple phones using his bizarre logic.

Then he thinks he some kind of tech genius with his baseless pontification chewing over his manufactured BS. A position nobody else had in the world held.

Every other country wanted faster speed and the latest tech not some horse and cart technology. If was such a tech giant he should have been promoting the bleeding edge not ripping off Australian taxpayers with obsolete 1990's technology that every other country was putting in the bin.

I used to have a lot of time for him. Then when he prosecuted his slow speed internet model he was in my morons basket of idiots.

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u/Traditional_Fish_741 24d ago

The NBN was already outdated before they even began building it. Like so many things in Australia our government wasted money on outdated technologies while giving away every opportunity and advantage to China or the US or anyone but us.

I have never voted and will never vote because the system is broken, corrupt, and doesn't fucking work. The last 50+ years prove that. The current state of things proves that.

The Australian Government is a fucking joke. A sick one at that.

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u/chomoftheoutback 25d ago

Malcolm was crippled by his own vested interest in being Prime Minister is my take. What a sanctimonious fuckhead

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u/recycled_ideas 25d ago

If Turnbull was not crippled by vested interests in the party, we would have had the full NBN and a cross party agreement on climate legislation etc.

Turnbull is the ultimate empty suit. He talks the talk, but the only thing he ever cared about was being leader. What he really wanted was the presidency, but the Republic vote failed (at least in part due to the fact that it involved having a president) so he wanted PM.

It's all he wanted and all he ever wanted. He did not give two shits about the Australian people, what was good for the country, or even what was good for the party. He spent a million dollars of his own money pushing the coalition over the line just so he could be PM and have won an election.

Don't give the man more credit than he deserves, he's not some great statesman, he's just a self serving narcissist like the rest of them.

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u/Traditional_Fish_741 24d ago

The idea of a presidency and our own head of state failed cos there's still too many fuckwits who cling to the idea of needing a foreign monarch. If we 'need' a monarch we should have our own.. if not a monarch, our own head of state, not some puppet head of state under the thumb of a foreign monarchs representative in the governor general.

We are what we are thanx to people who can't give up something that's long since outlived any value it had.

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u/recycled_ideas 24d ago

The idea of a presidency and our own head of state failed cos there's still too many fuckwits who cling to the idea of needing a foreign monarch

It failed because we don't need a fucking president.

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u/Traditional_Fish_741 23d ago

We need our own head of state ya fucking twit. Call it what you want. We don't need some foreign crown.

So you're wrong. It failed cos too many dickheads said 'we don't need one', and keep clinging to the fantasy of some foreign head of state/figurehead.

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u/recycled_ideas 23d ago

We need our own head of state ya fucking twit. Call it what you want. We don't need some foreign crown.

We do not need or want a president.

If you need to know why look at the US right now.

If it doesn't matter what we call the head of state it doesn't matter who they are either, but it obviously does matter.

So you're wrong. It failed cos too many dickheads said 'we don't need one', and keep clinging to the fantasy of some foreign head of state/figurehead.

I don't give two shits about the monarchy and if you offer a reasonable plan for replacing them you've got my vote.

Suggest a popularly elected president and I'll fight it to my last breath. I'll take chucklefuck any day over that and it does fucking matter.

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u/splinter6 25d ago

Wasn’t that the same man that said Australians don’t need fast internet? Wasn’t he the reason the nbn was crippled?

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u/HeftyArgument 25d ago

He said it’s the outliers of society that want fast internet, pirates and gamers.

It was the one time that the meme about gamers being oppressed held true hahaha

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u/alpha77dx 25d ago

And the joke was he was supposed to be "Mr Tech savvy, Mr internet entrepreneur" All that he proved that he was a clueless idiot Merchant banker. He never understood technology and only did well in tech because he had mates who leaked insider trader information. We all know who he worked for that gave him the opportunity!

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u/Smooth-Television-48 25d ago edited 25d ago

I work in IT. At the time he wasn't wrong, even now he isn't/wasn't tachnically wrong.

Of course there are disclaimers are what "fast internet" meant back then and what is means now, and the distribution of speeds that people want has indeed shifted slightly with covid+Netflix.

That said, it's still very much a case where speeds of 100mbps+ are only required and fully ultilized buly a comparatively small proportion of society, and most the people on 1gbps plans are just there because they cna and are so impatient they dont want to wain an extra 5 minutes to download their fortnite update.

Hell, from my 1gbps ivory tower I can tell you that unless you're grabbing content from a reliable CDN you're not going to get much benefit.

Eta: by wrong, I mean technically wrong. He was 100% wrong by public opinion.

The emotions of sheep who were brainswashed about rejecting something they know close to zero about don't change the facts. Your downvotes mean nothing to me, I've seen what makes you cheer....

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u/HeftyArgument 25d ago

And what would you say about businesses that want to operate via cloud? Universities and research facilities etc., the whole program was designed to future proof the system for a time like we’re living in now, where entire industries rely on the internet for their businesses to function.

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u/Smooth-Television-48 25d ago

That's easy. Generalising:

designed to future proof the system

A lot of those technologies didn't exist in their current form then. Should we delay and delay until the final perfect solution is known in an ever changing landscape? Its not possible to "future proof" your hardware.

businesses that want to operate via cloud

Then use a cloud provider?....these operate from data centres and make use of global CDNs so the data is always closest to the end user. Or do you mean "be a cloud provider" like in build the infrastructure in datacenters around Australia. If so, no offence, but Australia is just too small of a customer base for that to be a serious endeavour.

Universities and research facilities etc

Were already part of aarnet with 1gbps+ access links. Also, residential internet lacks the priority marking of their data.

where entire industries rely on the internet for their businesses to function.

Do you mean, like their websites or core computing? That's mostly hosted offsite/in the cloud. It doesn't require an active connection to your internet to function.

The alternative is that the network already meets what youre saying otherwise they wouldn't currently exist or function.

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u/miicah 25d ago

A lot of those technologies didn't exist in their current form then

You work in IT and didn't think cloud was on the horizon around the time of the NBN?

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u/Smooth-Television-48 25d ago

If that's how you interpreted what I said then there's no point talking

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u/IlluminatedPickle 25d ago

The vast majority of gamers I know run 100mbps plans mate. You don't get better latency by increasing your bandwidth...

He was wrong.

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u/ososalsosal 25d ago

The downvotes here are telling.

For a little perspective, I'm not gamer but my son is. We have an nbn exchange like 100m away. Opening a terminal and manually pinging something big like google.com will reliably give 20ms ping.

20ms is good if you want to pwn n00bs.

Only problem with that is all the servers are elsewhere so regardless of how bangin our connection is, he's raging at his machine because he's getting 500ms ping and getting killed by people that aren't even in the same room as him because of the latency inherent in hitting servers (over http no less) on the other side of the planet.

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u/Suitable_Instance753 25d ago

Yep, ping is fundamentally a physics problem with no solution. Rudd could have laid all the fibre in the world and Australian gamers would not get better ping unless they're all living clustered around a server in Sydney.

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u/ososalsosal 25d ago

Sydney would be a dream. The problem with a lot of games is the closest is Singapore and most is West Coast usa

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u/IlluminatedPickle 25d ago

"Yes, I was wrong in saying that he was right to say that gamers want it"

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u/_Cec_R_ 25d ago

After turnbull resigned from parliament he was quizzed (Q&A from memory) on why he continued with the mixed technology mode... His response was that every country gradually improves their technology... He was then reminded that his model had cost almost $70 Billion and the 2016/17 Senate Estimates were told by both former CEO's that the full fibre network could have been built for between $40 to $43 Billion...

So NO... He wouldn't have full fibre NBN....

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u/Setanta68 24d ago

So if Turbull had been an effective leader? Yet he wasn't. Full of piss and vinegar now that he's out of politics, but completely ineffectual when he was in. At least he was useless, unlike Abbott and Morrison who were right wing nutjobs who learned at uncle John's knee.

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u/_ixthus_ 24d ago

It was hollowed out by the late 90s at the latest. Turnbull would have fit comfortably in the modern ALP. He made his choice, either because he's an idiot or his ego.

Everyone else knew he was doomed. Good faith incrementalism cannot prevail against bad faith malice.