There's a joke making the rounds today, and it goes like this:"Labor wants to give us South Korea's internet speeds, with North Korea's internet controls."

You want another joke? The Coalition's broadband policy.

For a nation which has historically underinvested in its vital national infrastructure (roads, rail, energy, stop me if you've heard this before) even this seems a bit hard to swallow. Apparently for the Coalition, technological development came to a screeching halt back in 2007. The Coalition wants to bring everyone in Australia up to the same standards that many folks who lived in Australia's major metropolitan areas could purchase back three years ago - presuming, of course, that Telstra hadn't blocked their particular exchange from competitors, leaving them with expensive but low-speed broadband.

Yet the Coalition wants to propagate this failed system. Worse, they want to shower billions of dollars on players already shown to be unethical actors in the private market, in the hope that out of this largesse comes enough broadband to get the digeratti to STFU. And maybe they will, for a few years. But what happens when the next great round of innovations come pouring out of a country which invested in its internet infrastructure, innovations which require ever-high-broadband speeds? Ooops, that's right, we're stuck using the same copper wires we installed a century ago. And copper has limits. You can't send a billion bits a second over a piece of copper wire, because that turns the wire into an antenna, and all those bits just radiate away into the air.

This is physics, a subject that shadow minister for communications Tony Smith and Liberal fixer Andrew Robb should really get their aides reading up on, because it's important - even vital - to the understanding of communications policy in the 21st century. If that pair did their maths, they'd come to understand and accept that fibre-to-the-premises is inevitably a part of the Australian future. There's no way that any other combination of technologies - whether copper or cable or wireless - can handle the endless demand for increasing levels of connectivity which is the singular and inescapable fact of 21st-century life. Smith and Robb talked about 'unforseen' technological advances which would obsolete the NBN. But even a casual survey of the developments in telecommunications over the last quarter century would show them that, in fact, increases in broadband have arrived predictably, like clockwork. Fibre reliably remains around 100x faster than wireless, and will do so into the imaginable future. That's something we can plan on. That's something the Government did plan on - it's built right into the NBN. Fibre networks can be turned up to higher speeds as needed, at very little additional cost. That's simply not possible with either wireless networks or copper networks. In the future-proofing sweepstakes, there is only one winner: fibre.

So what's really going on here? Is this merely an attempt for the Coalition to differentiate itself from Labor? Or is there something else going on? Can it be that the Coalition really thinks the market will meet our need for increased bandwidth, when crossing the chasm into the next level of connectivity will require a massive investment with very long-term returns? It's something Telstra did not do. It's something Optus could not do. The numbers never worked for them. Not because there's no economic model, but rather, because the economics are a poor fit for publicly traded firms which live or die on quarterly results. The creation of a nationwide fibre network is capital intensive, but it's not money that will be poured down the drain. It will be recovered over the next generation.

This is the key difference between Labor and the Coalition: Labor want us to take out a mortgage and buy a roomy new house - which we'll pay back over the next 20 years. The Coalition is perfectly happy for us to continue to rent the same shabby unit we've lived in for the past hundred years. Sure, they'll slap on a new coat of paint, but nothing will disguise the fact that the floors aren't level and the plaster is beginning to crumble.

I'm torn. I want the National Broadband Network. Australia needs the National Broadband Network. Multiple oeCD reports tie GDP growth directly to the connectivity of a given nation. The NBN will give us a couple of tenths of points of GDP growth for a decade or more. That alone will cover any costs. But Senator Conroy won't give up his ridiculous internet filter, even though nearly everyone in the country (with the exception of Clive Hamilton and the Christian right) ridicules the idea. Do we move forward, to be gagged at ever-higher speeds? Or do we react with a typically conservative fear of the future, and drag our heels, even as our friends and neighbours race by in their shiny new sportscars? At least the Liberals don't care what we look at on the Internet. Even if they don't give a fig how fast we get there.

Mark Pesce is one of the pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher.