Can anyone take the Federal Government seriously? Their recent spending tsunami is beyond belief. The proposed $43 billion super fast broadband network splurge ahead of more critical infrastructure projects is reckless.
Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that this country is the driest continent and water supply in many areas is critically deficient.
This could be rectified if the billions of dollars currently being wasted were spent on drought proofing the country. Just ponder the concept of our vast tracts of arable land having reliable, sufficient water supply. We could be the breadbasket of the planet.
Without sufficient water the future for this continent could be bleak and a high-speed network not worth a whit.
There is no doubt that a high speed broadband network is important in the longer term but can we afford it now?
As our population ages and the work force retracts proportionately, the demand for fast broadband will diminish accordingly.
This lightweight amateurish Rudd Government is driving the nation to a financial hiding from hell. Generations ahead will be paying for their incompetence and have little to show for their largesse.
Lindsay Collison, Weston
Kevin Rudd's high speed internet plan announcement (100 times faster) must be the greatest joke he has pedantically proposed (to quote ''we must have this'') to the Australian people.
On ABC TV's Lateline on April 7, while discussing this and other issues, he suggested he makes mistakes and is not perfect.
I must agree Rudd, as this money (tens of billions of dollars), mostly ours, will be wasted while the hospital, schools and other infrastructure are crying out for fixes and funds.
Won't it be ''great'' that if in the years ahead everyone can access the internet faster while these and other facilities remain in decline.
Brian Hale, Wanniassa
Panel exclusion
Paddy Gourley (''Understand the limits of war, or our military will take us nowhere'', The Public Sector Informant, April, p12-13) oddly claimed that the ministerial advisory panel on the Defence White Paper included none of the ''country's best national security thinkers''. The three-man panel is deliberately comprised of those independent of current Government service and includes the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (a retired major general and former head of Defence's strategic policy division), Australian academia's best defence finance expert, and a former head of both the Strategic Defence Studies Centre and the Kokoda Foundation.
Moreover, when the panel was announced, the the Australia Defence Association noted that the really encouraging thing was who was not on it and how the Government appeared to be moving on from Labor's late-Cold War thinking of the Beazley era.
Perhaps Gourley, a long-retired Defence bureaucrat of the discredited ''divide-and-conquer the three services'' school, could suggest just who he thinks has been wrongly excluded and why.
Neil James, executive director, Australia Defence Association
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