Fellow travellers, I just heard Julia Gillard on the ABC at the official launch of the National Broadband Network in Armidale, NSW. At the risk of sounding a little patriotic this is clearly a great day for Australia.

Now that the program is well underway, and - as Stephen Conroy said, on time and on budget - all those appalling NBN naysayers will just have to shut up, won't they!

The Government is truly doing it once, doing it right and doing it with fibre! And a year or two down the track, with our whole nation revolutionized by the network, we'll all be looking back thinking "what was all the fuss about?". There'll be similar puzzlement over why there was such a vicious campaign against the carbon tax, too.

Julia Gillard has shown brilliant, far-thinking leadership here, even though she has seemed somewhat confused recently. The very impressive Anna Rose of the Youth Climate Coalition summed the situation up sassily on Q&A just days ago

So in the short term it is hurting her in the polls but I think people realise ultimately the difference between decisive leadership that Abbott is trying to present and good decision making and when we have this power sharing arrangement where we actually have a Government that is forced to listen to different perspectives and incorporate that into policy, I think we will get better outcomes because ultimately that is what people are looking for when they go to the polls in a couple of years and vote. They're going to be looking at outcomes and by that time we will have had a price on pollution. The sky won't have fallen in. In fact the sky will hopefully be a lot cleaner. We will have had the National Broadband Network. We will have had the mental health funding roll out into the system, so we will have outcomes and I think that we will see hopefully those numbers improve if we do get good outcomes from the policy.

What a searingly brilliant analysis. And so true.

Guided so wisely by the Greens, Labor will have delivered undeniably positive outcomes to this nation and the planet. The downloads will be faster, the mental health will be better and most importantly the sky will be cleaner. Consequently the people will be happy, Gaia will be thankful, and I will be dancing with my cat!