And with John Bowler on his side, he commands five Legislative Assembly votes — enough for minority government with the Libs, or a majority with an apparently fragile Labor. So much for the old predictions that one-vote-one-value would destroy the Nationals and cement the big parties!

Also, what’s up with all the criticism of the WAEC from pollies? They’re taking just as long to finalise the vote count as they’ve done for every previous election I’ve seen, but just because Labor couldn’t win government this time means there needs to be an inquiry?!

But then THE LATHAM BEAST reared its ugly head.

Team Howard says this is proof that Labor intend to backflip once elected, and if they’re to pull a rabbit out of their hat this election, I think a scare campaign along these lines may be their best bet. So it’ll be interesting to see if this story disappears as quickly as the other scandals of the campaign have.

In true Latham style, there’s a kernel of truth in what he’s written — the big announcements from each party really haven’t been far off identical. But then, how does that differ from the 2004 election …?

I was somewhat disappointed by the apology from Bill Heffernan on Wednesday — not because he was doing it grudgingly, his hand clearly having been forced by Johnny, but because it means the crazy NSW senator will be silenced for at least a couple of weeks.

You see, the other bits of his interview in the Bulletin revealed just how much time he spends thinking about being horny. So I was looking forward to all-new slurs being thrown at other Labor figures — we could have heard how Senate leader Chris Evans doesn’t understand the average Aussie because he supports the Dockers (real men root for the Wagga Brothers!). Or maybe environment spokesperson Peter Garrett could’ve been cut down to size with a reminder that the people of Australia will never trust a man who waxes his head.

Instead, the Heff’s been pushed aside by last night’s announcement from that big bear of a man Joe Hockey: WorkChoices will be made slightly kinder and gentler. Even though this’ll quite nicely blunt criticism from Labor and the unions, it doesn’t constitute bowing to public pressure, oh no. It’s just that Honest John found some places where his flawless IR policy needed a “stronger safety net”.

First the scramble to replicate Labor’s broadband policy (which hasn’t yielded anything yet), and now this. So it seems that what we have a new strategy from the federal Liberals: just photocopy Labor’s press releases!

I wonder what this strategy will yield next? Maybe Kevin should dump his concern about repeating Mark Latham’s mistakes, and start talking about our troops in Iraq …

But on closer scrutiny, I’m not so sure that spending billions of public dollars to cover the country with fibre to the node is the best way to go about fixing the problems in Australia’s broadband. After reading Joshua Gans and Ross Gittins, I’m thinking it’s a step in the right direction, and way ahead of what we’ve seen from Howard so far, but also not the best possible decision.

The “wow!” factor can be found in the hearty responses of both Telstra and Optus, as well as more than a few bloggers: Tim Dunlop reckons it’s vital infrastructure for future growth, Kim at LP and Fred at Troppo argue that this is a sound investment, and Aussie Bob describes how the Liberals have been left scrambling in Rudd’s wake.

A rundown of the plan: the successful private tender will get partial government funding to kit out cities and towns with street-side boxes linked by gigabit fibre, and ISPs will be free to sell ADSL2+ on existing copper from those ‘nodes’ to your house. $2.7 billion of the $4.7b public slice will come from the same Future Fund that’s ahead of schedule (even though much of it is in underperforming Telstra shares).

This is an improvement on existing ADSL, but isn’t any great leap forward in technology (though it could be a stepping stone to the Holy Grail, fibre to every home, as seen in Asian cities). Celebration will come from the huge numbers of people in urban fringe or semi-rural areas who are out of range of a DSLAM. The remaining people in more remote areas (150-ish thousand households) will get thus-far unexplained upgrades to Internet service, possibly via HSDPA wireless (i.e. Telstra’s pricey “Next G”).

The question is, why not just directly fund those last two groups of people, rather than the entire country? Here, I think, is where political considerations enter: for starters, that’s the ostensible aim of several current programmes, which haven’t done that well. Also, Labor might be afraid that funding for regional areas (rather than the whole country) will invite accusations of pork-barrelling. Given that FTTN is the most logical technology for country towns without ADSL, a targeted rollout would mean that those folks would get better Internet connections than voters in the city (and there are a lot of towns to fix). Politically speaking, it’s probably simpler to pony up some more cash to bring everyone to one happy minimum standard rather than trying to patch up the areas that really need help.

The most compelling critique of this comes from Joshua Gans, who points out that this kind of nationwide investment is expensive, and probably isn’t needed. I think he underestimates the importance of connection speed for uses like monitoring sick people or delivering education to people in remote areas (working with these guys taught me about the latter), and Peter Martin makes a similar mistake. But they’re both on to something in suggesting that faster broadband is urgent-but-not-that-urgent — most online services require only “standard” broadband because that’s what the majority of US consumers have, and therefore that’s what Silicon Valley companies develop for. I’m not sure we’d get any benefit from being ahead of the US on this one.

The obvious response, “why wait for the Americans to develop services?”, has a simple answer: our copyright laws and small business regulations make it awfully hard to do that kind of innovation in Australia. So this is an example of Labor’s propaganda (“entrepreneurs will miss the chance to take part in the earliest stages of industries that will in time be worth billions”) being overblown. In addition, this isn’t an argument for covering the whole country with fibre — we don’t want to lure technology companies to Meekatharra, we want to lure them to Perth. Other flaws in the policy document include its use of old data in its case about falling behind globally, and its ignorance of the main reason for low average broadband speeds — namely that there’s little usage of cable or ADSL2 when Telstra can still make money selling people overpriced 256k.

Telstra wanted to fix this last year by replacing its copper network with FTTN, but the plan would have cut off competitors like iiNet (because there’d no longer be copper running out of exchanges where they’ve installed DSLAMs). Unsurprisingly, it failed to get past the ACCC, and Sol has been bitching about it ever since. With this in mind, maybe a better solution would be a regulatory system that encourages both big and small players to deliver fibre in smaller chunks, such as by letting home builders choose a provider to install fibre lines right now, rather than new Telstra-owned copper.

That said, Labor’s policy will achieve similar outcomes — if the new network has a different ownership structure to the existing telephone system. Something like a separate holding company, partly owned by the telcos using it, would be perfect (like how the credit card companies are owned by participating banks, or how our international fibre is laid by consortium).

Second-best would be to separate the companies that sell service to homes from those wholesaling bandwidth to companies (like what the WA Government has tried to do with electricity). The ideal method would have been to split Telstra into a networks company and a retail company before selling it off, which has been mentioned many times. But that horse has bolted and I don’t see any prospects for forcibly splitting Telstra as long as Sol is still in the country. Rather, I see hope that this FTTN plan could give us a new network to replace all but the last kilometre of Telstra’s copper, and if that’s owned in a non-Telstra structure, that’ll give us de facto separation.

There are big gotchas to be had in that this is a public-private partnership (not exactly fashionable right now), and that it’ll be necessary to strong-arm Telstra to get access to that last kilometre between the node in the street and your house. But I don’t think these are insurmountable, which is why I’m prepared to give this proposal conditional support.

I was asked to assess this policy on the grounds of whether it’s a good reason to vote Labor, and since it’s an improvement on the status quo (notwithstanding devils and details and so on) I have to say that it is, at least for now. It’s far from the ideal policy (and there are plenty of better reasons for voting one way or another), but I don’t see anyone in Howard’s cabinet being willing to deliver the regulatory changes and directed spending that are really needed. There’s a chance that the Liberals could take over as “the party for faster Internet!” … but it’s not likely.

So. Sunday’s announcement about “clean coal” — basically, the Ruddster wants to mirror-without-mirroring the Government policy of pumping money into coal power plants using technology that isn’t archaic — struck me as somewhat of a grand compromise, in that it tries to placate Peter Garrett’s crowd (look! it says ‘clean’!) while keeping unions happy.

Indeed, this is the only pattern that stands out to me when looking over his announcements from the last few months: he sticks to the centre of the playing field, doesn’t do anything all that radical or offensive, and he bends over backwards to keep everyone more or less on his side. I wasn’t old enough to ever witness Bob Hawke in action, but “The man who can bring business, government, and the unions together” was a pretty nifty campaign slogan, and the Ruddster seems to be inspired by it.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — heck, if Rudd can keep some peace with conservatives, it’ll save us from the divisive time we’ve had under Howard — but it also means that if he wins the election, I won’t be expecting any ground-breaking new policy direction from him. There may be an exception in the realm of foreign policy, what with the Ruddster being a former DFAT employee and all, but so far he’s been singing a pretty similar tune to past Labor leaders. Maybe this is part of the whole plan: don’t come across as a loose cannon, keep people sympathetic (or at least tolerant), and then rely on the nerdy charm to win over voters!

Elsewhere in Federal politics, it sickens me that the Attorney-General is all self-congratulatory in a piece in the Daily Telegraph last week about the copyright reforms that were just passed by the Senate. Never mind the fact that the changes introduce new ways for content cartels (music companies, et al.) to screw consumers around, or that it’s just a patch-up job that will quickly become obsolete again — all must be well because there’s a new clause for comedians!

The amendment act (introduced a few months ago) was changed just before the vote, and Kim Weatherall offered up a thoughtful assessment:

Yes, despite the rising chorus of concern about the criminal provisions; despite the complete absence of any serious consultation process prior to these laws being released, they’ve done only a token amount to assuage people’s concerns here. They’ve removed the provisions that people were carrying on about the most – the ones that most directly affected ordinary consumers.

An example of the stupidity in the changes: they clarify a new section designed to make sure that “caching by educational institutions for efficiency purposes (proxy caching) does not infringe copyright”. This is a positive step in that it formally legalises a common practice (just like the ‘iPod exception’) but it’s also quite bizarre. The overwhelming bulk of caching is done by ISPs and by software on people’s computers, not by universities. And while the legal status of caching in this country has, to my knowledge, never been clarified, the authorities have seemed happy to accept it as a technical factor that can be ignored.

There’s an existing section that says temporary storage for the lifetime of a request is fine, which sets a precedent for the law’s spirit (if not its letter). So really, the new text should have replaced that section and made it clear that anyone’s caches can last as long as needed, or else they shouldn’t have bothered. I dare say that the section was thrown in so it can be pointed to while saying “look! we’re helping universities with these changes!”

On that note: if, as their marketing firm clearly wants, the Lib’s Flash animation were to turn into a viral promotion (which I don’t see happening, so I have no qualms linking to it ), it’d be copied. Things like screengrabs would start popping up on YouTube, people would hotlink the .swf file from various places, and desktop/phone backgrounds would be produced from the images. Naturally, none of this will be legal under the new copyright laws.

• First up: the proposed new building for 140 William Street (above the new train station) is awesome. Not as pretty as the Raine Square development across the road (which, BTW, is definitely going ahead), but very functional and very bold in its design — and we need more buildings in Perth with architecture that triggers strong reactions (as long as they’re not all bad …).
• Glenn Milne’s little scuffle at the Walkley Awards nicely epitomises, I think, the way that old media stalwarts simply don’t get this new-fangled Internet thang. (Though admittedly, Crikey has hardly been angelic in its treatment of Milne. The sneaky buggers have also, by my guess, bought AdWords that link to news.com.au rather than their own site …)
• There’s another leadership spat in the Labor Party. Yawn. Although I think it’d be cool if Big Kim were to win the next election, Howard-style, it’s not exactly something I’d bet on. Problem is, I’m far from convinced that anyone else on Federal Labor’s frontbench could do any better.
• The continuing debate about daylight saving on newspaper letters pages annoys me for its pointlessness, but I notice that among the pro camp there’s a strong sense of the old mindset that says Perth is still some sort of country town, and can’t function without the assistance of our older & better-established bretheren o’er east. I keep reading things about how farmers and other businesses desperately need close-timezone contact with Sydney, as if the west coast is devoid of warehousing or financial services or something.
• Speaking of daylight saving, it amuses me that the Lotteries Commission had its “you can take an extra hour with your Lotto ticket!” ad out days before the State Government launched its (lame!) attempt to inform the public about the time change yesterday — an entire four days before the change happens!
• Today is World AIDS day, meaning the world’s been reminded of how bad the situation is, and a former American president is out pointing to the next problem area. Sadly, the Pope was also in today’s headlines, and while it’s good that he’s healing rifts within Christianity, it would be far better if he actually tried doing something to address the problem of AIDS among poorer people, many of whom are Catholic. Oh sorry, my mistake, that’d be against his principles.
• Finally, sense has prevailed in the question of Federal funding for an HPV vaccine (the one that’s reported in the media as a “cervical cancer vaccine”). But it’s actually only partly prevailed — a basic concept in public health is that mass vaccinations are all about stopping the spread of a disease, which means that boys should be vaccinated as well as girls, and the age range should probably be wider too. The current funding arrangement is likely to just paint HPV and cervical cancer as a “women’s issue”, rather than as a real sexually-transmitted disease about which everyone should care.