Waleed Aly Tackles Turnbull On Australia’s Crap Internet And Gives A Little Nod To Logies Racism

For all the Prime Minister’s experience in the Communications portfolio and constant talk of innovation, it doesn’t seem like much is actually being done about the biggest tech/communications problem facing our nation: the internet. In a regularly conducted State of the Internet Report released last week, Akami found we now rank 60th in the world in average internet speeds. Last year we were 44th; a fact which was, at the time, considered “embarrassing”.

Tonight, in a monologue by himself and The Project producer Tom Whitty, Waleed Aly took a look at the government’s actual work in remedying this. Though the Coalition were quick to call out Labor’s initial vision on the NBN as costly, slow and unnecessary, it turns out they may be delivering something even worse. With Turnbull’s government opting for shitty old copper rather than vastly superior fibre connections, pushing the date of delivery back, and upping the cost, we could be constantly staring at Netflix’s shitty loading symbol for decades to come.

This is, by the way, some of the incredibly popular editorial work which earned Aly a (somewhat controversial) Gold Logie nomination this week. In acknowledgement of that — or more accurately, the bizarre racially charged furore the news has been met with — Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson also cop a cheeky little shoutout around the 3.25 mark.

“The problem here is, despite the latest figures showing the amount of data downloaded by Australians increased by 40 percent from June 2014 to June 2015, the Abbott/Turnbull government has never demonstrated that they value the need for high speed internet,” Aly says.

“The biggest infrastructure projects in this country’s history were built with the future in mind. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was built to last hundreds of years; the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built with eight lanes, not two. But now, as we enter Malcom Turnbull’s “age of innovation” and we’re told the NBN is the most important infrastructure project of the 21st century, we’re expected to rely on a decaying copper network that experts say is already past it’s use-by date, instead of investing in fibre which the same experts say could service our internet needs for the next 100 years!”

“If you’re watching this right now on the internet, and you had to wait for even a second for this video to buffer, you know who to blame.”