Things Collapsed In A Parallel Ether

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Every story folded in upon itself a thousand times. They sat in that theatrical soi, Soi 4, Soi sahm, where The Balcony and The Telegraph sat opposite each other and falangs would go with their Thai boyfriends, the oldest, fattest f...ks showing off what they could only pay for, or showing off what good taste they had in the purchase, or maybe, let's be kind, just seeking other company. Except that's not what happened. Everybody stared. Nobody talked. The waiters flurried around. They sat and had something to eat because their local favourite restaurant was shut. All things considered. He waited and he watched. There are some very bad ones, your one seems nice, the American next to him said. Yes, he is, he agreed. The previous one was very bad. Thought nothing of polishing off a bottle of whisky every day. Led me on a very merry dance. Took everything away. Left a quivering stick; a landscape over bright, a cluttered junk yard of futuristic metal. Yes, the same thing happened to me, the American said. He took everything, but I was obsessed. Every body warned me. We would go out and my friends would ring up later saying Tony, what are you doing? You're being ripped off. My Thai friends said the same thing. We booked into a hotel once and the manager, who I didn't even know, said to me: "You can do better". I know, he agreed, everybody warned me too. But I didn't listen. No, I didn't either, the American agreed. I don't know why. No, I don't know why, either, he agreed.

Except of course in some funny way he did know why. Rough trade could be very cute with its clothes off; and exciting in a way that the nice boys just weren't. Even if they ripped you off and led you a merry dance; it was part of the price. At vulnerable times in our lives. On the sois, on the streets, walking past the beggars and the stalls, walking through covered wagons and blasted images from the past, walking away from everything they had ever understood and calling out: hey sweetie, come and get me. I'm yours for the taking. As if anybody wanted. But they did want your money; and what it could buy, the upmarket drugs, the upmarket hotels, the Black Label whisky, the long nights in the karaoke bars, the cheap girls, the full on laughter as if all time stood still. We wanted you. We were wasted on ourselves, on long nights alone, on intemperate longings, on wasted space, wasted time. So when opportunity knocked he took it; just like that. And the money flowed like water. Now he lived to regret it. But the story kept folding over itself none the less, like the final lapping waves on a distant shore, the final last dribble of the tsunami that was, there on the other side of the planet. Did things finally make sense? He doubted it? Had he been repeatedly warned? Of that there was no doubt.

This one OK, Aek mimicked on the way home, having perhaps understood more of the conversation than he should have. But they laughed good naturedly. It was their time together and their time to be happy; and nothing would alter that, no matter what happened in the future. He couldn't be surrounded at this point, and he wasn't going to surrender. I go school, Aek said in the soi, in that funny, sunny voice of his; limited English. We're going to complain and we're going to explain. It's good that he's going to university, the man said, explaining in Thai that he was an applied linguist, that he taught teachers how to teach foreign languages. It was a specialised brand of work. I come here three times a year, he explained. I used to work here. There were all sorts of things that could go wrong. There were times that would never be the same. The disturbance was just out of field. You worry, John? the boy kept asking. Because he knew him well enough now to know. Well he was worried indeed outraged there wasn't the same money there that should be; and those bloody tenants in Bondi Beach were screwing him around again. He was sick of the whole damn situation; and worried it was going to cost him. Time stood outside the notion, the nation, things collapsed in a parallel ether, and yes, he worried, perhaps most of all that his perfect life would end.

THE BIGGER STORY:


Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/boost-for-tony-abbott-as-newspoll-puts-election-at-50-50/story-e6frfllr-1225899743709#ixzz0vP6XsDVp

The Prime Minister has claimed the underdog status in the federal election campaign after a Newspoll out today showed a 10-point turnaround that left Labor and the Coalition dead level.
The poll increased the Coalition's lead in the primary vote to 44 per cent and put both parties on 50-50 on a two-party preferred basis. Voter approval for Mr Abbott also improved in the key areas of economic management, national security and the handling of asylum-seeker arrivals, The Australian reported.

At the start of the campaign, Labor led the Coalition by 55-45.
Julia Gillard is blaming the slump on only having shown "glimpses" of herself to voters in a stage-managed campaign so far. But she has promised to take charge from now until August 21.
"I think it's time for me to make sure that the real Julia is well and truly on display," she told Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper during a campaign flight from Sydney to Melbourne over the weekend. "I'm going to step up and take personal charge of what we do in the campaign from this point."
The PM said she had no regrets about toppling her predecessor, Kevin Rudd: "I made the right decision in June. I made it, I stand by it, I'll live with it. It was my decision."
But she said she was now sidelining campaign bosses. "I do believe people are right to worry that modern campaigning is too managed and too tightly scripted," she said.
In an interview this morning on the Today show, she has vowed to "throw that rule book out and really get out there".
At the same time, Labor's campaign spokesman was targeting Tony Abbott as a "weather vane" who changes positions on issues to suit the day. As the Coalition's poll numbers firm, Labor will target Mr Abbott personally to make voters consider if they really want him as PM.
But Mr Abbott has said the spotlight is really on Labor now. "What I hope is happening over this election campaign is that the real nature of the government is being exposed," he has said on ABC radio in Cairns.
"I think I'm a pretty known quantity," he said. Mr Abbott is in Cairns for an announcement on tourism. Ms Gillard is in western Sydney talking about education. She is expected to pass through Bennelong, former prime minister John Howard's old seat, later today.
Horror week
Week two of the campaign was a shocker for Labor, with damaging leaks and continuing in-fighting and divisions over the fallout from Mr Rudd's removal. The drama came to a head on Friday afternoon when it emerged Mr Rudd was in hospital for gallbladder surgery.
Labor's primary vote dropped to 37 per cent while its two-party preferred vote fell two percentage points, meaning the party would have to rely on Greens preference votes to stay in power.
A Herald/Nielsen poll published last week put the Coalition ahead on a two-party preferred basis by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. The gap between Labor and the Coalition is now bigger than it was the weekend before Mr Rudd was removed.
Although Ms Gillard has retained her lead over Mr Abbott as preferred prime minister (50 per cent to 35 per cent), and is seen as more "decisive and strong" and more "likeable", she trails him on the economy, national security and asylum-seekers.
Dissatisfaction with her performance has also risen three points to 40 per cent, her worst rating since becoming leader. Depsite this most voters still think Labor will win the election but more are moving the Coalition's way.
Senior Labor sources, spooked by the party's own polling showing Labor would be defeated in an election if it were held now, have revealed there have been serious concerns raised in the Labor camp over the past week about the party's campaign strategy.
Labor sources admitted they could not remember a worse week for a government. "Not even in 1996 did we have a week that bad. You'd also have to say it was the lamest," a senior Labor insider said. "She's obviously going to make changes, which is highly unusual for a campaign and, I dare say, unprecedented.
Another Labor source said: "Leave the leaks aside, what did they have her announce? A crackdown on knives and gangs. There were no big policy announcements. She hasn't even mentioned Labor's strengths, which are the economy, health and education. I'm gobsmacked they've had her out there doing nothing."
The Newspoll survey was conducted for The Australian between Friday and Sunday evenings.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/pity-the-pm-didnt-hold-broadband-to-the-light-then-oppose-it-20100801-111c5.html#poll

Why did Gillard let through $50 billion to be wasted on the broadband network?

Julia Gillard is right. The story about her cabinet comments on parental leave and age pension increases costing some $50 billion is a beat-up. The real question is why she didn't apply the same critical approach to the cabinet decision to approve the $50 billion (including the government payment to Telstra) rollout of the national broadband network, which went to cabinet the night before it was announced on April 7, 2009.

It was approved without any cost-benefit analysis or even a rudimentary business case to support it.

The plan was based on conversations between Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, over a couple of days flying between Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The proposed rollout is the biggest infrastructure project in Australia's history. Proper process requires written submissions from the initiating department to the Cabinet Office in sufficient time to have the relevant documents circulated to other ministries - especially Finance and Treasury - so their officials can provide cabinet briefings for their ministers on the worth of the proposal.

There was no urgency for the decision, no white paper setting out the pros and cons. Clearly the cabinet was dysfunctional. Even the most superficial understanding of ministerial responsibility shows that the members of cabinet weren't doing their job, especially then deputy prime minister Gillard, Treasurer Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.

All the public - and I suspect all the cabinet - got was an announcement in the form of an 800-word press release after the decision was made. The only reason for haste was that it provided an effective distraction to the announcement on the same day that the so-called expert inquiry into a less ambitious proposal for fibre-to-the-node at the end of the street had ended in farce.

The well-paid experts reached the obvious conclusion that once Telstra had been excluded from the tender process on a specious technicality, there was nobody else capable of undertaking the work.

To add insult to taxpayer injury, cabinet then approved a $25 million study by consulting firm McKinsey to find a rationale for the decision.

McKinsey was not asked to do a cost-benefit analysis. This would have shown that the National Broadband Network Company is likely to be the biggest white elephant in Australia's chequered history of infrastructure development.

To fund it, the government will have to borrow up to $30 billion at 5.5 per cent. The McKinsey study found that in the best case there would be an internal rate of return of 7 per cent. Effectively, the government is getting no return and the high likelihood of multibillion-dollar losses. The private sector would not undertake such a project without at least a 20 per cent internal rate of return because of the massive risk.

Even with Telstra on board, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $14 billion, the economics of the broadband network remain improbable.

Even so, the government is keeping its investment off-budget for the time being. But the likely future losses will have to be brought on to the budget bottom line as part of the deficit and the money owed will become part of the public debt.

Given the opposition's pathological concern about debt, and its quite rational opposition to NBN Co, it is surprising it hasn't attacked the government over its decision to keep the funding off-budget.

The opposition might also ask why boutique investment bank Lazard Carnegie Wylie has been given a $3.4 million contract to provide financial advice. Is it because they had the foresight to employ former Labor prime minister Paul Keating as a lobbyist for the company?

Last week, Gillard said in defence of the broadband network that it was the equivalent of building railways in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bollocks.

The alternative to the railway was the horse and cart. The alternative to broadband based on fibre optics is very fast broadband based on mobile technologies and existing fibre assets. These technologies already provide speeds that more than satisfy customers such as universities and hospitals, and even about 60 per cent of Australian schools that are already connected to high-speed broadband.

Writing in the respected telecommunications newsletter Communications Day, Kevin Morgan reports on a New Zealand study that showed the shift from no broadband to slow broadband yielded productivity gains, but the move from slow broadband to high-speed broadband had no discernible additional effect. According to the newsletter, the government obsession with the rollout of fibre-to-the-home as planned by NBN Co has all the hallmarks of a cargo cult mentality.

The market is already supplying more than adequate high-speed broadband for those who need it. Australia has much higher infrastructure priorities - repairing the damage to public education at all levels by the Howard government, updating and extending rail networks and closing the world's most polluting brown coal power stations for starters.

Kenneth Davidson is an Age senior columnist.

Picture: Peter Newman.