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Tony Abbott recently pronounced the former government ''wacko''. The Prime Minister was not referring to Rudd's campaign of Count of Monte Cristoesque vengeance, or to Gillard's bizarre ''real Julia'' gambit, or abandonment of single parents to Newstart. No, for Abbott, what's certifiable is the Labor Party's national broadband network. Abbott told The Washington Post that his government is ''changing the objective from fibre to every premise in the country to fibre to distribution points.'' From madness to sanity, yes? Well, not quite. Since the Coalition announced this plan, industry experts have noted that the fibre-to-the-node technology will be slower and less consistent than Labor's fibre-to-the-premises plan. The FTTN's copper lines have a narrower bandwidth, lose signal strength with distance, are less durable and have limited potential for upgrade. Yes, Labor's plan is expensive, but it seems a more secure long-term investment. This is why Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the world wide web, calls the NBN ''a wonderful commitment to getting everyone connected''. This is why internet pioneer Vint Cerf admitted to being ''envious'' of the Labor plan, and why the head of the International Telecommunications Union, Hamadoun Toure, said the NBN would make Australia the ''No.1'' world broadband. This is not, of course, the final word. I am no expert on broadband technology. Online debates about FTTP and FTTN burn and smoulder for days, and rightly so: it's a legitimate empirical debate. And even with a robust plan, the Labor government might have fumbled the roll-out, like a drunk dropping keys on every front porch in the country. It's easy to sell possibilities - actuality is often more dubious. The more intriguing point is that Tony Abbott, despite many expert judgments in favour of the Labor concept, has declared the plan ''wacko'' to a prestigious overseas newspaper. Most obviously, this is poor diplomatic form, which has already been criticised by pundits as a ''rookie mistake'', among other things. In other words, even if Abbott is correct - and there is no evidence that he is - it is considered unstatesmanly to play partisan domestic politics on an international stage. But the usual journalistic tally of tactical errors interests me less than the portrait Abbott paints of the world: one in which the Prime Minister and his party represent sanity, and the former government madness. It is an oddly Manichean vision. One might dismiss this as political rhetoric - what Jonathan Green, in his sharp The Year My Politics Broke, calls ''massaged message and carefully repressed conviction''. No doubt Abbott's line contains some quantum of calculated spin. But Abbott's message - that the former government is uniquely irrational and inept - is so consistent and vehement, it is difficult to believe that the Prime Minister is not genuinely committed to some version of this idea. In the same interview, he described the Labor government as ''the most incompetent and untrustworthy … in modern Australian history''. A straightforward and bold factual claim. As Orwell noted, empty doublespeak is often more evasive, and thus harder to refute. At the very least, Abbott seems to believe his caricature as he draws it. And so confident is Abbott of its veracity or popularity that he will sketch, without pause, his picture for a global audience - including the Obama administration, with whom Gillard worked closely. Put simply: Abbott is committed to this caricature of his political rivals, or he at least believes that this portrait will sell as well abroad as it has domestically. Either way, this picture is worrying. It does not suggest practical wisdom: a knack for responding to milieu and ambiguity. It suggests an evangelist or apparatchik, for whom the world is neatly divided into us and them, goodies and baddies, my common sense and their lunacy. There is nothing necessarily ''conservative'' about this view - one only has to read Alasdair MacIntyre or Michael Oakeshott to recognise the nuance of the best conservative thinking. Instead, Abbott's slur suggests that word so often reserved as an insult for the left: ideology. The late Tony Judt, in his essay Captive Minds, noted the similarities between ideologues in Soviet communism and laissez-faire capitalism. ''[T]he thrall in which an ideology holds people,'' he wrote, ''is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.'' The alternative in this case is not a radically new social and economic model, or even a familiar version of Western democratic socialism. It is a broadband network, and the Prime Minister diagnoses its supporters as insane. Physician, heal thyself.

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