The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated PUBLIC. /1 https://t.co/OP2ltPw6BB

The hilarious irony now is that one of the world’s most promiment libertarians, @elonmusk, has rectified this for us, by offering the same broadband to all, irrespective of location. A brilliant, bold initiative. Australia used to be brilliant and bold in public projects. /2

Now like most of the world, the whole idea of the ‘public’ has more or less disappeared. Replaced with the libertarian alternative, majorities and minorities. Itself driven by electoral methodologies, which we now mistake for democracy itself. Faced with the challenge of…/3

…turning society into nothing but millions of sovereign individuals, how do you then undertake any sort of group or collective action, under political libertarianism? You just count. Majority rules. The problem though is that it then means the proposed individual sovereignty…/4

…of each citizen may be violated, if they’re not in that majority. They have to suck it up, they lose. As regional Australians did with broadband, until Starlink. As many do now with Covid, if they’re ‘vulnerable’ (minority). Our Covid response evolved from the same set of…/5

…ideas that gave us our string and tin can broadband. And notice the response to the energy crisis is going the same way, towards ‘protecting the vulnerable’. It’ll fail in the same way that’s failed for Covid, and for the NBN. The public is not a majority OR a minority. /6

It’s everybody. It’s a very complex, sophisticated and badly understood idea, the public. It’s not about counting anything. It’s about recognising the complex interdependencies of all types of people, how we need all of that diversity to be stronger collectively. /7

Often in ways we won’t see, there’ll be no logical causal connection between how all of that diversity somehow fits together. That become visible during the pandemic, though, when the interdependencies started to break. When toilet paper ran out. When nobody could get staff. /8

Government for all of us is not government for the majority, with various sop schemes for the minority ‘vulnerables’. That’s what I call safety net democracy. It doesn’t work. Because we’re electoral fundamentalists, we take that one simple method, counting votes,…/9

…and substitute it for the real task of democracy, always. To govern for the people. The public. Not for a majority of the people (which shifts with every issue), or with band aids for the minority vulnerables. For all of them, at the same time. /10

Not because that’s kinder, or fairer, in some patronising way of ‘looking after’ everybody. The vulnerable often despise being patronised in that way, it’s insulting to them to be seen as deficient. It’s why they vote for aspiration rather than welfare, given the choice. /11

We govern for all because it’s all that works. It’s all that respects all of those interdependencies. Without that society ceases to function, as we’re finding across the board now. Look at the UK, falling apart under decades of libertarian minority and majority nonsense. /12

We need to use a PUBLIC health process to defeat Covid because that’s all that will respect those complex interdependencies. The libertarian ‘focused protection’ of the ‘vulnerable’ is failing in the same way the NBN failed, and energy is now failing. /ends