Obama Looks Down Under For Broadband Plan 387
oranghutan writes "The Obama administration is looking to the southern hemisphere for tips on how to improve the broadband situation in the US. The key telco adviser to the president, Sarah Crawford, has met with Australian telco analysts recently to find out how the Aussies are rolling out their $40 billion+ national broadband network. It is also rumored that the Obama administration is looking to the Dutch and New Zealand situations for inspiration too. The article quotes an Aussie analyst as saying: 'There needs to be a multiplier effect in the investment you make in telecoms — it should not just be limited to high-speed Internet. That is pretty new and in the US it is nearly communism, that sort of thinking. They are not used to that level of sharing and going away from free-market politics to a situation whereby you are looking at the national interest. In all my 30 years in the industry, this is the first time America is interested in listening to people like myself from outside.'"
We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh good lord.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't we be a leader and make our own plan?
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Japan doesn't have the landmass... they have fewer lines to lay and less overhead.
I question if looking to Australia is still a bad idea because they generally have most of their population along the shores, right? Our problem is that we have such a landmass with people spread out. Obama always likes to think of "everybody" when he does something and thinks that my parents who live 50 miles from the nearest major city need ultra fast broadband.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what we've been doing, and it sucks.
As an Australian living in Australia.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Obama is asking Telstra / Australia or the Australian government ANYTHING about broadband than my American friends, I am very very very sorry for you, quite sincerely - this can not end well at all.
Telstra is one of the most vile companies in existence, Microsoft may get mocked a lot here but that's only because the evils of Telstra are not known internationally. (We're talking about a company that first introduced Bigpond cable with a 100mbyte per MONTH limit, no - I'm not joking)
As for the broadband network, it's a load of cobblers, we won't see it for a decade at least, it's one of those dopey empty promises which mean absoloutely nothing (no, I'm not a liberal, not even close)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
How is more landmass an excuse for why a rural area has better connectivity than the middle of a city of a million people?
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you suppose the Japanese pay something additional in taxes to get those high speeds?
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the problems I see presented on this issue stem from the fact that competition is artificially limited through regulation.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
It only sucks because the government didn't force companies to upgrade their networks when they took money from the government to.......upgrade their networks.
All the government had to do was actually enforce the measures they enacted and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So yes, while the companies are definitely in the wrong for essentially embezzling the money, the politicians who gave them the money and then let them just pocket it are even more in the wrong.
**Apologies for any typo's - Firefox doesn't want to run on my system without crashing every 5 seconds since I overclocked it (everything else runs 100% fine, and no system crashes - so the problem is with Firefox) and good ol' Shiternet Explorer doesn't have spellcheck.**
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha! I'll believe that when I'm connected to it.
Prediction (Score:2, Insightful)
Dozens of dittoheads will pan this without even considering that it's worth talking to people who built national broadband networks so that we don't repeat their mistakes.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As an Australian living in Australia.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're kidding yourself, absoloutely and utterly kidding yourself, your faith in government is incredible.
I'm only 31 and I've worked in the state govt for 4 years now, I know how things work - most people should, do you not read the paper or follow the news?
3 to 5 years, maybe - if you're in a specific targeted 'beta' area (probably new housing estates)
Good luck.
You don't have to look outside the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
As a town in Minnesota [arstechnica.com] discovered, all you have to do is threaten to roll your own. Suddenly 50Mb/s for $50/month is available.
The problem isn't technology, population density or land area. The problem is that local government provide a monopoly (or oligopoly), so there is no incentive to truly cut margins and invest in infrastructure. Stop that, and companies will find a way to keep getting that check in the mail.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
"Because Japan doesn't have the landmass... they have fewer lines to lay and less overhead."
If we lit up all of our dark fiber we'd surpass most nations. the telcos and cable companies aren't doing it, though, preferring to overcharge and under-deliver.
They should be sued for $200 BILLION for fraud and contractual violations.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha! I'll believe that when I'm connected to it.
Sounds about right... the Australian government is notorious for under delivering. Expect this roll-out to complete in a decade, by which time the average consumer will have 10 gigabits wired directly into their brain.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
I exaggerate, but there are surely better places to look.
Look to the local talent (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you bash him... (Score:4, Insightful)
But honestly, Nowhere does it say "Obama has hired Austrailian Telco Analysts", or "Obama is modelling the effort after the Austrailian effort". Looking for inspiration means asking around and picking up ideas. Just like a software engineer who goes to Google to look for inspiration. The bad ones just copy and paste, but the average and above just look at the other results and try to mold a better solution. I would say this is allegorical. We'll see what happens.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you going to be able to pay $small_ISP $20k to rip up the street and pull you a run of fibre? But once you do, your neighbour can get it for $1k, so the rest of the street will naturally follow suit, rather than going to a different ISP and also having to put down the initial $20k.
Having a bunch of different ISPs serving different houses on the same block really isnt feasible.
I think, ideally, the last mile would be municipally owned, and they then lease the lines to $small_ISP of your choice, at a flat rate. That's the only way I can see a bunch of ISPs working out.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
And what government DOESN'T?
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
Without "government intrusion" there would be no telecommunications market. Do you think that private companies are going to bury millions of miles of fiber and then just let their competitors use their cables? And how do you think these telecoms are going to get access to dig up all these endless miles of public property? Taxpayers pay = you answer to our elected officials.
So wrong it doesn't deserve a full answer
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would companies choose to go into areas that are heavily saturated? This would only be feasible if they have some dramatic innovation to offer, which would benefit the people living on that street.
If I choose to pay for the fiber, then I make the deal to get profits from additional customers gained on that line of fiber, if not, good for my neighbor! And I've just voluntarily subsidized my entire street.
Why is it not 'feasible' to have different ISPs on the same block? And why would they operate this way? The whole problem is how we view the service itself. The service, as it is, cannot innovate because of the regulation. The innovation of firms left to their own is much more imaginative than what you or I or certainly some bureaucrat can think of. I never thought of Netflix or using the Internet in that way, but I signed right up for the service! Did the USPS work with the FCC to create that? No, it was a spontaneous product created by innovators.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure there are natural monopolies.
- Rail network
- Water / Sewerage
Society would be significantly worse off if we had many rail networks and many water suppliers, each with their own tracks and pipes. Large amounts of resources would be wasted.
These are cases where pooliing of resources into a monopoly is better for society as a whole, *provided that* the government effectively regulates such entities so they don't extort their customers.
This is less so for things like power and communications, because cables are not as expensive or bulky as pipes and tracks. Still, society would probably be better off if the amount of resources used for building cables were minimised, since expenditure on cables does not directly aid the productive capacity of society.
From society's point of view, the ideal would be to have one set of infrastructure with either a heavily regulated, benevolent provider of services (ha), or one set of infrastructure with many competing services utilising it.
The problem is the *lack* of government intrusion into these markets to facilitate competition. Hence, one set of infrastructure, one / two providers who gouge their customers.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are you kidding?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Private market — despite occasional flaws — is the best there can be. And when there is a problem, it is usually traced to the government's filthy little fingers. In this case, it is the "genius" decision to grant telecoms a mono- or, at best, duopoly over a market...
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
No kidding... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not only that, but also the belief (sincere or not) that equality ought to trump quality... Government-provided schools, clinics, roads, subways, postal service, inevitably suck, but they suck equally for all — rich and poor — except, maybe, for the superrich like the politicians, who view themselves as more equal than others [wikipedia.org] and send their own children to very expensive private schools.
To the holders of this opinion, the fact that parts of the country can get an ultra-fast optical connection (without government's subsidy), and that there is not a person any more, who can't get a high-speed dial-up (without government's subsidy), is nothing compared to the inequality between the two extremes.
The trouble with this attitude is that it is impossible to make things equally good for all people. So all attempts to do so end up making things equally bad. Equality is achieved, and quality was secondary anyway.
It is this crusaders for equality, who keep bringing up "growing income disparity" — and advocate taxation and regulation to make things "fair". Why they haven't yet thought of amputating a limb of Michael Phelps — to "level the playing field" between him and other swimmers — is beyond me... Clearly, his 8 Olympic gold medals is grossly unfair towards the rest of the swimmers, who swam the same distance at nearly the same times, but got no or one gold medal only.
Re:Unfiltered, I hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't follow us (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, are you assuming it'll need to pay itself off in a year? That's not how long term projects work. I'd suggest it's probably going to be targeted for 20 - 30 year return period, so you'd be looking at a far different cost base.
The reason the government is doing it is because they're the only ones that can take a 20 - 30 year timescale. It's called building infrastructure, and it's what governments are supposed to do with our taxes.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down. However, I simply don't buy the argument that one firm can rule the country. If they were offering such terrible service at such a horrible price, then someone would happily have offered a competing service. Has Intel been able to keep new competitors from popping up? Of course not, because there is no regulation on microchips.
The goal of every business is to have a monopoly, which is why businessmen are not actually capitalists, from a philosophical perspective. This is why giving the businesses the power to control their destinies through non-market strategies is bad for everyone.
It could be argued that some companies may develop technologies that are so revolutionary that they gain a monopoly because nobody else has a competing product, such as was the case for the telephone for a few years. But this is a good thing - firms are encouraged to invent amazing new technologies so great that we can't imagine what life was like before them, and they get to make loads of money for doing it. However, these protections last for only a little while as either patents run out or competing firms develop different technologies that provide the same service. However, once regulation enters the picture the original firm is protected by the regulation, because no one can enter the market without meeting the requirements of the bureaucrats who are owned by that firm. So the regulation creates the problem
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it always depressing, when my government tries to come up with its own plan and doesn't bother to have a look how other nations did it.
That is either ignorance, arrogance or misplaced pride.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
You probably helped write the health care reform bill also....
dutch situation (Score:2, Insightful)
Here every company is allowed on 'the last mile' to the client (ADSL), whoever owns that infrastructure, for 'a resonable cost'. Gouvernment overseers constantly watch that fee, and whether the owner complies. The effects are that I can choose from many companies, some in a death spiral to the lowest cost, some striving for better services.
Two months ago that same law is now in effect for television-cable, and the first companies are offering internet through that channel (on the competitors infra).
Of course the telco's have been fighting these laws with all their might, and they lost.
So I think I could very well serve as an example for you in the states, to break the monopoly/duopoly state you are in.
Watch the current ADSL state; some are only adsl, some with telephone, some with TV; and usually no download caps: http://www.shopadsl.nl/adsl-aanbiedingen/
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
How much speed are you actually gaining? You're not saving much time if something goes wrong every hour or so.
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why aren't they looking to places where they actually have good broadband? Like Sweden or Finland? I mean come on, Australia? I have a good friend who lived there for almost 5 years and he had horrible broadband. Slow transfers, dropped connections, download caps, poor customer service, took 3 months to get service installed, you name it. Here in Finland we have 100Mb connections at a reasonable price. Sweden has had 100Mb even longer and they pay a lot less. Recently, Finland even established the right of all citizens to 100Mb broadband access by 2012. The infrastructure here is already well on the way to meeting that today.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
The best place to look is France. They regulated the market so that those who owned the lines had to allow other people to use them at a fixed rate. This lead to many new startups that offered service on those lines, fueling innovation and lowering costs. Regulation is sometimes needed to break monopolies.
J
Re:Before you bash him... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most bashing here is ideologically driven and the bashers don't need real points to argue when they've already decided what the one true path is and who isn't on it.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes. The government has a free ride in the cities, where there is lots of competition among the corporations to fill in the gaps, but those of us in more remote areas pay just as much (or more) in taxes, which the government takes from us while providing almost NOTHING in the way of services to justify what they take. This is one thing the government CAN do to justify its existence, and it's about time it did.
Re:A short history of Australian telco stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>Are you going to be able to pay $small_ISP $20k to rip up the street and pull you a run of fibre?
I call bullshit. Verizon has been rolling-out FiOS without any need to rip-up streets. They simply run the wire through the same government-owned pipe that Comcast uses. You could have Time-Warner, Cox, Charter, and other internet companies sharing the same metal pipe, each with their own cables running in parallel.
And before you say "that's not efficient" - well neither is having ~20 different companies all making cars, but it gives the consumer the power of choice.
.
>>>I think, ideally, the last mile would be municipally owned, and they then lease the lines to $small_ISP of your choice, at a flat rate.
Not possible. There's not enough room in a single cable to allow multiple companies to operate. Take Comcast for example. Their cable is already full from 50 megahertz all the way up to 5000 megahertz. There's no room to "share" that line with someone else.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>the government takes from us while providing almost NOTHING in the way of services
False.
Study-after-study has shown that rural citizens (i.e. the red-colored zones) get MORE money, per capita, than people in the cities/urban areas. This is because the rural citizens have their electricity subsidized and their phone connections subsidized by government or corporations via the Universal Service Fund. And soon their internet will be subsidized too. If rural citizens paid the *true* cost of these long-distance runs of electric/phone they would not be able to afford it.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
Because running cables is a significant effort and expense. There are two barriers to running cables - economic and geographic.
Economically, it doesn't make sense for any one company to run wires unless they know they have enough customers to pay for it, which means many of the original cable wires probably would not have been run if it weren't for government sponsorship.
Geographically, in order to reach households, you need a continuous connection from your transmission point to the individual homes of each and every person, and in order to do that you need poles and wires installed along right-of-ways. That means you need to deal with individual landowners to get permission to put up the poles, then go harvest the trees and make and install poles to put your wires in place.
So, once you get the first company out there that's done all of that, they'll tend to have placed their poles in all the best spots and landowners are going to be reluctant to allow yet another set of poles and wires wires to run through their property, even if it's practical at all. That's assuming you are able to clear the first hurdle of getting every landowner between you and every customer to sign off on planting poles and running cable over their property.
And, of course, once a company goes in it's in their interest to yield as much money as possible off those poles, which means they're going to maintain a monopoly by either not offering pole space for rent, or charging outrageous prices for it.
Enter the US government.
The decision was made that power and communications constituted a "Public Good". To minimize the negative impacts of that good, we needed to have one set of poles for electricity, later telephone, and even later cable. One company would be subsidized and assisted in the installation, and in return they would accept regulation as a monopoly.
It was in the best interest of the first company to take that deal. In order to cut through the patchwork of landowner objections, the government simply used Eminent Domain where necessary to get the poles in place (a power unavailable to any company). The government could also allow the use of road setback areas for many of the poles.
Now that the wires are in place, and the government has assisted with the installation of those wires, the companies that accepted that assistance do not have the right to arbitrarily set prices. They can either accept competition (which means they give up their exclusive control of the wires the government helped them place) or they accept regulation (which means the government regulates their prices to make sure they make a reasonable profit on their investment, but that they cannot leverage their monopoly position into excessive profits).
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:5, Insightful)
They simply need to take over the pipe like any utility, and then rent the pipe to broadband providers. That would ease the issues with getting things like fiber layed out, while opening up the market to competition. I think one of the biggest hurdles is getting permits and licensing to actually lay the pipes themselves. Too expensive, time consuming, and too political.
Internet has become just like any other utility. It should be treated that way.
Unless anyone has forgotten, it was the deregulation of cable that caused an explosion in pricing. It's also allowed these markets to become limited to one or possibly two providers if your lucky. Now these exclusive agreements is preventing anyone else from entering the market. If the government takes over the pipes and then just rents those to providers at a fair price, it would remove that hurdle and open up competition.
There is no competition now and painful pricing is the obvious result.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
Ha! In Australia its the regulation that makes the market competitive. The American's who ran our version of pre-breakup AT&T (Telstra) got very frustrated at not being able to kick their competitors off their network (a former government asset), and left.
You know, you say one thing: "In Australia its the regulation that makes the market competitive" and then immediately refute it: "The American's who ran our version of pre-breakup AT&T". What is Telstra? A telecommunications and media company formerly owned by the government. So the problems with competition in the market come from government regulation. If the Australian government had never had a telecommunications company, there would have been no need for government regulation to create a competitive market. If after privatizing Telstra, the government refused to grant Telstra any special privileges, in time, market competition would have taken care of the problem.
Never give the government kudos for "fixing" a problem that the government created. (I used quotes around the word fixing, because often the government takes an action that appears to fix a problem but over time it is discovered it either made the problem worse or created new problems just as bad as the one that action was intended to fix. I do not know whether that holds true in this particular case or not.)
well it's either Oz ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:2, Insightful)
That's because study after study look at the limited scope of an issue, not the entire economic play between red or blue or whatever zones being served. So you say subsidized, I say it's a fair trade, because those red zones are often where your food come from. Blue areas subsidize red areas in some ways, red areas "subsidize" blue areas in some ways.
I see these half-info'd posts on /. too often. Too often "red zones" is special language for conservatives, Republicans, and "study after study" language for "it's been defacto shown we supply welfare for rural folks one-sidedly."
Blue zones, the cities, are packed in. The distance between "homes" are usually apartments or row houses, so you can run 10 fiber lines and serve 100s of homes. The economics of scale for networks and infrastructure are well served by cities and packed in living. This applies to airports, public transportation, networks, and many other things, such as health care and energy.
In rural areas, those 100s of homes could be the size of the entire damn city or more. Yet essentially the same lines must be run, now spread out over that same area, to serve that number of people a short hop served a city apartment complex. Obviously, it's going to cost more, because of repeaters and other costs, like trench digging or poles and simply extra line length.
Think of it this way, what would be the food cost in a city if food was produced IN YOUR CITY EXCLUSIVELY. It'd be tremendous. There are certainly efforts for rooftop gardens and skyscraper gardens, but food produced there is higher than rural produced food. Even small COOP farms, if they exist in metropolitan areas, have higher cost because of the novelty of them.
One more thing--I often see attacks on /. hidden as "red zones" are backwards, inept, religious, etc., how come they don't do X Y Z like we blue zones people. Well, if you don't want them backwards, these subsidization balances out things. Similar as you don't want to starve, blue zones import red zone food. Personally, I'd rather drop the party colors, but these days the old physical skin color racism has given way to pervasive political colors.
Broadband Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with Net Neutrality is the last mile. Thus instead of adding more regulation in the form of Net Neutrality, the government needs to address the issue of government granted monopolies on the last mile. Once that is addressed, Net Neutrality issues will fade away. But Net Neutrality can be used as a stick to get more competition in the last mile.
What needs to happen is the Federal government needs to tally up how much tax payer money has gone to the telecoms, add interest, and then tell the telecoms that they need to pay back X billion dollars, once they have done that, they will own outright their own network. The money paid back to the government goes into a fund available to other ISP's that want to lay their own fiber.
Local municipalities would build, if they haven't already, a pipe in the right of ways in front of every house, going to every house. This pipe is what competing ISP’s would use to lay cable in, instead of having to dig separate trenches themselves. The local government would charge a minimal maintenance fee to any ISP who wants to lay cable in the pipe. The telecoms would also pay the same fee, even if they are not using the pipe, which would be for access to the right of way in front of, and through people’s property. This way the construction and maintenance of the pipe is guaranteed without any higher taxes.
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:4, Insightful)
Multiple competing sewerage providers is a ridiculous idea. How are they going to compete? Commercials that say "Use us, because our sewage is cleaner? Maybe?" People don't care how clean their sewage is, they just want to flush the toilet and get back to work. A scarier scenario would be a commercial like "We'll take your sewage for pennies on the dollar, which is all you care about, and then don't worry what we do with it wink wink." Innovations in this market means finding ways to get rid of sewage while spending as little as possible - NOT providing excellent but somewhat pricey service like the government has an interest in providing.
As for the train stuff, apparently you aren't aware of the ongoing discussion about the issue. It's widely accepted that passenger rail never made a profit in its entire history, and in fact can never make a profit. Throughout all of its golden years of universal use, it probably never paid back the cost of laying rail. The government needed to subsidize these expenses because the infrastructure is important to the common good and a free market wouldn't work here.
Re:You don't have to look outside the USA (Score:1, Insightful)
The difference is scope.
Small government public options are generally OK. Small government initiatives have small scopes and damages are limited if they go wrong. Small governments can look at other small government initiatives and see what has or has not worked elsewhere. An individual can effectively fight small government through law suits, or even by running for and winning local elections. Worst case scenario is that an individual can move and escape their small government. Large government initiatives that are quickly ramped up with no trial runs, no precedents, and quickly become entrenched institutions standards are generally a bad thing.
The Minnesota case, and several similar recent stories I have heard of, are examples of small government at it's best.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're looking to AUSTRALIA for advice on broadb (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a terrible idea. How the hell could you ever drive on the street? And what happens when TWC "accidentally" nicks Verizon's fiber?
Do you simply not live in the real world? There are physical limits here. There can only realistically be one provider ripping up the streets; at the moment that's a private company. It should be the government who then leases it out.
Something similar happens with DSL. Verizon owns the copper to my house (and happily provides crappy DSL service over it) but are legally required to allow anyone else (in my case, ATT through Covad) to hook up their stuff in the DSLAM. So my internet is Covad, and my router talks to them.
Why not replace Verizon with the government? In other words, remove the natural-monopoly property for infrastructure - it's not trivial to run your own broadband company, but it's certainly achievable.
Re:As an Australian living in Australia.... (Score:3, Insightful)
two major political parties in Australia are the Labor party (left-center) and the ironically named Liberal party (right conservative).
I'd say that labor would be center-right and Liberals would be center-right-right.
Considering that current PM got in by saying 'we will do exactly the same thing as the liberals, but with more kittens!' means we had a choice between a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans - OR - a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans, but we are heaps different from that other party!
(pretty much the same situation around most of the western world I see.)
I wonder what its like to have different political parties to choose from. (And yes, I do tend to vote independent/minor parties first, big rubbish parties mostly last and nutbag parties lastest!)