Most of the criticism I’ve read is rubbish — what’s up with Joe Hockey and this “lost control” nonsense, or his constant dummy-spit about taking on some debt? There is a pretty strong global consensus that cutting spending is unwise (witness California, or indeed any American state), and while it’d be lovely and morally pure to remain debt-free, that’s nigh impossible in the current climate. We will at least still be one of the least-indebted OECD members, and unless the recession becomes long-lived and revenues drop sharply again, the proposed debt is quite manageable.

Rather than arguing about how much is spent, though, I think it’s quite fair to entertain criticism on where it’s spent. There is room for decent arguments that this budget does scant little for the environment, that the spending on education is good but not targeted correctly, or that the proposed infrastructure spending is neither big enough nor bold enough. But then again, see above; not going too far into deficit is a pretty important consideration, and on that front I think the general balance looks about right. (Imagine if the spending levels had been Keating-esque!)

Oh, and the budget includes $236 million for the Northbridge Link rail project in Perth (leaving the Sydney Morning Herald to whine on the front page). Again not perfect (it’s not enough to go past Lake Street!), but still, who says the Commonwealth never did anything for WA?

Thus I thought I might do a quick and thoroughly unrepresentative survey. In Hong Kong, it’s HK$600 per month for PCCW 100Mbit fibre (that’s US$75 or A$100-ish), while Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden charge 320 kronor (US$40 / A$55) for the same. In New York, Verizon will slug you $140 (A$200) for 50Mbit or $60 (A$95-ish) for 20Mbit — though note that their base US$45 offering is worse than my iiNet connection in Perth!

However, none of those networks was built with government money. South Korean fibre got about $1.5 billion worth of subsidies in the early 2000s (mostly for rural areas), and a Korea Telecom 50Mbit connection in Seoul costs a mere 26 000 won (US$20 / A$27) per month.

Of course, prices in Australia would never start that low. But then, my dial-up connection in 1996 was $5 per hour of use (thank you, Telstra), and of course prices will drop over time. Early adopters may well be slugged $100+ a month to cover construction, but given that the network will be owned by a wholesaler that’s not likely to remain a problem long-term. Optic fibre won’t go obsolete anytime soon; a properly-managed FTTH network should hopefully mean cheap and fast Internet five or ten years after it’s built …!

That said, FTTH is also more awesome! We are being promised 100 megabit, the same speed as a typical home wired network, and fibre has plenty of room for technology upgrades. But the 2017 completion date and complicated-sounding public-private partnership are less awesome; how the owner of the new network behaves will be an important question (or in other words, keep yer grubby mitts off, Telstra!). Details are just as scant as they were with the old proposal, so it’s no easier to draw conclusions.

To compare, the best residential Internet in California is 15 megabit, but most people (me included) have closer to 5 megabit; in New York City the fibre service maxes out at 50 megabit (though that’ll likely be upgraded). So it’s not fair to diss on this as slow — unless you compare to places like South Korea and Hong Kong, where crazy population densities allowed even my dodgy hostel to provide a hundred-megabit connection (on good days, at least).

A better question is whether this will be a worthwhile investment, given alternatives. If it works, I can see this giving long-term support to new online services, online TV and VoIP and the like — which would be a great way to nudge growth in the tech and media sectors. But it might also become an ineffective burden on the public purse rather like how Optus and Telstra competed to lay coax TV cables. That technology isn’t outdated and the cables are still useful, but the money could probably have been better spent in mobile coverage or international data links.

Thus I reserve judgement. All else being equal, FTTH is cool, and will be a good thing — it’s just that the devil, as always, lies in the detail.

Apparently the local Republicans are so insistent on not raising taxes that they refused to vote for an emergency bill, without which the state was literally days away from going broke. So strong are their convictions that the last member to change his vote fears a backlash, and the first was dumped as leader — yet for all the bickering, the Republicans failed to present a workable alternative. Months ago, they proposed $20-odd billion in spending cuts, but the state was hit so hard by the financial crisis that that’s now barely half the deficit. (Today’s compromise combined $15 bn of cuts with $24 bn in taxes and debt.)

Lest this make the Republicans sound like the villians, I should point out that California’s Democrats are far from blameless — they refused to cut back on spending for months at the beginning of the dispute, and were largely responsible for getting the state into this mess in the first place.

And this is all apart from the practically Byzantine rules of California’s political system — rules that require a supermajority to approve spending (the same two-thirds approval needed to change the constitution), or rules that require a full-blown referendum for pretty much any tax change (and thus any big new spending).

I seriously wonder how anything happens around here, what with the state’s leadership caring so little for its welfare …