The short answer? Nerd rage. Lots and lots of nerd rage.
The long answer isn’t much more complicated than that.
After the Coalition won the election, concern started to mount about the future of the nation’s telecommunication capabilities. Clearly, fibre-to-the-home was a favourite over fibre-to-the-node, so a petition on Change.org started going around.
In less than a week, the petition gained enough momentum to attract over 200,000 signatures, forcing Malcolm Turnbull to step in and address the growing neckbeared-threat. The response wasn’t pretty:
Last Saturday there was a general election at which the NBN was one of the most prominent issues. The Coalition’s NBN Policy – which can be read here had been published in April – five months ahead of the election. The Coalition won the election.
The promoters of this petition apparently believe that we should ignore the lengthy public debate on the NBN that preceded the election and also ignore the election result. We should within days of the election walk away from one of our most well debated, well understood and prominent policies. Democracy? I don’t think so.
For those who don’t have time to read our policy (but time to sign an online petition) there are a few important points to bear in mind.
This is just an excerpt, the full response can be read over here.
Finally, we still wait with bated breath to see who will form the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet in Parliament, but we do know one thing so far: Stephen Conroy wants another crack at the role he walked away from when his proverbial horse lost the Labor leadership race to Kevin Rudd. Will he do a good job? Only time will tell.