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Disclaimer: I work in the library industry, with public libraries. Fund public libraries. Fund the hell out of them.

As we're moving towards the future, the disparity between those who have grown up alongside x, y or z technology and those who haven't grows wider and wider. Four hundred years ago it didn't much matter one bit if you knew everything your father knew and nothing much beyond that. A hundred years ago it didn't much matter whether you had your public education and then no education after that.

With this government determined to raise the retirement age to 70, there's going to be a huge imperative for re-education of sorts. And there is hardly a more suitable place one can think of this than public libraries. Maybe, to a certain extent, Khan Academy, maybe TAFE. But there's just such an enormous gap between what these facilities can do over a public library it's incredible.

While Google may well answer your question, what Google isn't going to teach you is what questions to ask it. It won't ever do that. The facilities and sessions and materials that a public library makes available to one in an ontologically intuitive and relevant defined hierarchy - How do I use the Google - that's important.

When you have the 55-year-old bricklayer with a back that's shot and not much support to speak of from his family, that's someone who can make a valuable contribution to society. And retraining at some TAFE is going to be one part of the equation, sure. But it's far from everything.

Frankly, this concerns me probably even more than the startup scene in Australia.

You embellish an ingrained primal desire, deep within every damn person in this country to want to know more and if they don't know run out and get the tools to know how to learn more, and this whole startup stuff solves itself.

You're from a left-wing party... "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". There's an inherent principle in Marxism that says let people do what they enjoy creating. As we've seen manufacturing disappear overseas and the cost-effective exhaustion of our resources drawing to a close, what else do we have left but an information economy.

You make 'from each according to his ability', some mythical spirit of mateship towards helping each other out and creating a better place a more overriding priority in the consciousness of whatever shit is on the front page of The Daily Telegraph, then you'll be closer towards that light on the hill. You have an election platform that somehow subverts that 45-year-old with no programming knowledge into going on Github and creating his thing - even if there's not a line of code per se to be seen in what he does - and we may end up with a better place all around.

And, yes, the NBN too. I'm sure you've seen, on reddit or Delimiter or wherever, me rambling about this before. I've just complained with a work mate about how, over distances of even 1600 km a carrier pigeon with a MicroSD card would beat the coalition's even more exhaustive supposed rumoured upload promises. Half of our customers are in Europe and with us, even within Australia, having half our staff telecommute the upload speeds are a pain in the butt. Seriously. The average upload speed in Russia is 22 Mbps. The best connection any of us have is 2 Mbps, some are on 300 kbps and less.

Sorry for rambling, especially in such an abstract preachy way. It's just that I, and I think pretty much everyone else, has had it up to here with the state of politics in Australia these past few years.

In all honesty, start-ups per se are the last thing the federal level of government should really be worried about. Because all you guys are going to do is throw money at some project about IT sales software for hair salons and some primitive system about keeping track of sheared sheep with barcodes or something.

Also: Immigration. Europe managed to open up near enough all internal borders and I'm not seeing much chaos. Sure, it's not going to make much sense to open up our borders to China or whatnot. But just allow people from Schengen to come to Australia, no questions asked. Restrict social security payments until a stay period of 5 or 10 years. What's the worst that could happen, honestly?

[jackgolding]

It would be awesome to see libraries offering free courses like Lynda and Udemy (we tried it at our university in my senior year.)

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I don't know about Lynda, much of what I've seen on it is just ridiculously reliant on Adobe products.

But in any case, while the content on these is great and all, what happens is that often you're then tied to a specific platform and there's no natural ecosystem at play here. You get what's currently promoted by the gatekeepers and you're getting there by somebody else paying for it.

While there's a great amount of value in these services, the sheer property of having a simple URL for a tutorial that can be shared across the world with nothing but a copy and paste is, in my opinion, greater than the additional value these services provide.

The value of being able to go on to any computer in the world, type in something random, as a suggestion from a librarian or a workshop in a library or whatnot, and clicking on the first YouTube video and knowing how to pick a YouTube video... that value is so utterly gigantic.

And yes, Lynda and Udemy are important too, I agree. We've actually been working on making services like these (but not these, because not many public libraries subscribe to them) more discoverable for library patrons. But they're going to be much more specialised and deliver much less of an punch to the face in terms of impact on everyone than blah.html on joelsblog.freesites.info or youclue.com/watch?v=anrmAOL901mRC could. With monetisation instead through Google ads or funding from random sources, including government institutions, or YouTube ads, why not - if your potential audience is going to be something on the order of billions of people instead of millions?

Do I disagree with you? At a good price point for library subscriptions, never. But I think there's more to it than that.

[jackgolding]

I just listed Lynda as it has a fair variety of topics and would be something I, personally would be interested in.

I was just thinking about what could get me to go to my local libraries more, I know that they can't afford the books I want to read as they are all too new and specialist.

[thmcmahon]

Hey thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment, it's not my job to publicly defend the ALP so I'll just note your views/criticisms but I think the libraries idea is a good one.

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And if I worked for freaking Sinodinos, the coalition counterpart here, that response would bore me stiff.

Not to be read as a criticism of the response per se, mind you.