Re: Everyone knows...
The policy of only rolling out services where it is 'commercially feasible' is the reason these 'black spots' exist in the first place.
The point of publicly-funded stuff in a social democracy is so that people everywhere get access to services, be they health, transport, education or even communication services.
Providing these services to people in more remote or less-densely populated areas or those on lower incomes involves the rest of the population effectively subsidising them. That is what it means to be in a social democracy.
That is where the ideological divide* comes in.
The ALP, just as the Republicans in the US, subscribe to the theory that services should be provided to the public by the private sector and that 'market forces' will somehow magically make everything fair and efficient, providing choice and competition and driving down prices.
If the current policy of rolling out network upgrades where they are most commercially advantageous was working then we wouldn't need such a country-wide project.
I believe that communication and the ability to interact the the wider world is an economic necessity and, increasingly (as more and more services move online), of great importance to the health and happiness of the public.
There are flow-on effects to all of this, allowing businesses in remote areas to access modern 'cloud-based' services and enable workers to telecommute. That enables them to exist and make use of the same efficiencies that larger or more urban businesses can. That allows them to employee people and provide goods and services where they are needed.
It's not fanciful - I have personally seen businesses hold onto old, inefficient systems simply because the did not have access to modern Internet connections, remaining little islands of personnel and data.
I digress.
The short version is that believe communication is a great benefit to society and it is the raison d'etre of a social democracy to provide such benefits to as broad a section of the population as possible.
Perhaps that is</em. a foolish notion.
* - <em>Though it's only a short hop from one side to the other these days . . .