Following one of the most lame policy launches I have seen (Minchin makes Conroy actually look good :/ ), Tony Abbot hit the 7.30 report last night to tote the Liberal’s broadband plan for Australia. It didn’t seem to be much more than the usual “hands off and let the market deal with it” approach which, as I’ve said before, explicitly entails people missing out. Find me a company that’ll provide Walgett better than a few MBps – lame satellite, lame 3G and weak DSL won’t cut the mustard. It’ll take fibre and it won’t be cheap. Conroy’s suggestion that the kind of services the Coalition intends to bring to rural and regional Australia should upset Nationals voters is spot on.

UPDATE(14/08/10): @PiaWaugh Interesting, NSW Farmers Association support NBN due to certainty of benefits to regional Australians http://bit.ly/dBTeRp #ausvotes #nbn

The whole piece clearly hasn’t spent much time in the non-tech head of our potential Prime Minister.

[Abbot] And what they’re going to use, as I understand it, is to string cable on telegraph poles. Which is hardly the most marvelously sophisticated thing to be doing in this day and age, either.

[O’Brien] It’s fibre where the signals will travel at the speed of light.

http://bit.ly/9pTUSP

For the full, painful, interview you can watch it on ABC iView here (expires in 12 days).

Transcript here.