That was my big complaint during the stimulus. Only "shovel ready" projects were being done. I wanted some infrastructure work to be done. It would have delayed the stimulus impact by a year or more, but it would have been more useful that repainting the stop lines at all the nation's intersections.

CoughNationalBroadbandNetworkCough.

Shhh. Enough politics on this board already.

Ohh, look, shiny object!

The Australian Govt has this thing called the "Broadband Guarantee" which supposedly ensures that we in the sticks can all get an equivalent service to our urban comrades. In reality it is the equivalent of the worst sort of broadband service, at the absolute standard price. So none of that competitive pricing stuff. Until we got off the satellite dish we were paying $50 a month for 1GB, and it was not exactly fast.

On the other hand, I can see that a lot of public services just aren't feasible in Australia. We have a very, very large area with most of the population in just a few small areas of that. The majority of the country is sparsely populated, so having good public transport, roads, broadband, even mobile phone coverage is economically and logistically impractical. On the other hand, the important things, like medical service and education have always been pretty good no matter where you are. We have good rural schools, good rural hospitals and every small town has a football field (of course!) which doubles as a helipad for medical flights to a specialist city hospital. And in the more remote areas we have the Flying Doctors, and the School of the Air has been going for almost a century.

Fast, cheap interwebs would be lovely, but any interwebs is good.

Our phone company/ISP is up for sale so they're pretending to be profitable by not doing any service work. We had spotty internet and no phone for 5 days last month.