Hosting a faux-News Ltd. general meeting in Adelaide, Murdoch uttered a whole string of things I more-or-less agree with:
- The tax system is a shambles. I think there's a greater need for clarity and fairness reform than a general decrease in rates, but still.
- The government surplus is somewhat useless, being, to my mind, really a John Howard re-election fund.
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Broadband internet in this country is crap. I don't know if the government should pay to improve the situation, but surely he's right to say that the crappiness will bite us on the arse in the long run. Our communications minister is unfortunately clueless on these issues; now it's not so much about availability as cost and quotas. As I say to anyone who listens, I used to pay $30 a month in Göteborg for a 100Mb/s connection connected to a gigabit-ethernet backbone with a traffic quota of 15Gb per day. Yes, you could and did pull eight megabytes a second on that thing. That was in 2004, and things can only have improved in Sweden by now.
We may be the second fastest country in the OECD to take up broadband, but I'm sure every other country really did take up broadband.
- On Mrs Clinton, blue sky Madame President:
"I can tell you she's running and I'd bet heavily on her winning the nomination but I wouldn't bet on her winning."
Who would have thought.
Beazley was stoked to have someone of import attacking the government, but as the big man's policy is to only back winners he couldn't expect a pat on the back himself.
(There's some more details at The Australian. Yes, he's trying to feather his own nest. It just so happens to be mine too, in this instance.)