It's not like that at all, we have very lax media controls.
I know you gun nuts think it's gone all Thunderdome over here since we restricted automatic weapons, but could you please refrain from making up utter bullshit about us on every fucking topic under the sun?

OK then - greed combined with political and market power. It's about protecting the profits of Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel which is the only game in town - everything else is being kept out.

It would provide unwanted competition to Rupert Murdoch.
Your second point is not correct or relevant since people are already using Netflix in Australia despite deliberate steps being made to stop them.

Travel+Holiday expenses+mac at US price (LessThan) same mac at AU price

That part seems logical. But I am amazed that "licensing and distribution" would be so expensive

It isn't, but that's the excuse. A few years back it was shown in a Mac laptop review that it would be cheaper to fly from Sydney to Hawaii for a five day holiday and buy the laptop over there than to buy it in Sydney. That's an extreme, but there are many items sold at inflated prices with flimsy excuses, especially when you still have to pay a markup for a download edition of some software just because of the region you are in.

With few suppliers the price goes up. You can see that with a lot of things in Australia, paticularly software with Microsoft, Apple, Adobe etc charging a lot extra because they can.

They don't appear to be a telco but they do seem likely to be in bed with them.

There's some Murdoch ownership there, via Sky, owned mainly by Mordoch like Foxtel is. Whether the link is enough to set policy is a bit of a guess but Rupert has a habit of taking a very active interest in anything he owns a part of and tends to have influence far beyond his level of ownership in some things.

I called your bluff and read it but somehow it doesn't say what you pretend it does. What's with this pathetic political bullshit on a tech site? Back off and look at the big picture instead of just attacking what the Party line says a good "comrade" should attack.

There's an article elsewhere on Slashdot about hopelessly depressing dystopias that deserves your post more than this one.

I'm paying more than that despite it being generated from cheap and high quality coal in efficient boilers, large turbines and well maintained generators. The middleman in a monopoly market is taking a huge cut - that's not just a local situation, it's come out of California where Enron played those games and went global. There's so little substance in that Forbes article that there is no way to tell if it's a problem of high generation costs or rent seeking vampire tactics by monopolists sucking everyone dry as is happening in many other markets.
Also your "disaster" appears not to have actually happened, while it is described as that in the headline the body of the text is only talking about potential problems in the future. So have things slipped your mind a bit here or are you being deliberately misleading to push an agenda? I'll assume the former instead of branding you the sort of childish scum sucking luddite political opportunist that thinks little of lying and is really making it annoying to discuss anything technical that may have social implications on this site. Such pricks annoy me far more than it is polite to write and seem to delight in leading the younger generation away into their land of lies and corruption.

The reason why Tesla doesn't want these dealers to have their cars is primarily because they are afraid that these dealers will throw a couple of Tesla cars in the corner of their showroom and be pushing the other brands instead

Apparently that is exactly what happened when Japanese cars first came onto the US market, until some very unsubtle bribes and buyouts changed things. Skills used when doing deals with organized crime such as the Yakuza were applied - that really say something about car dealerships doesn't it? The Japanese treated them as crooks and it worked.

Utopian = everything seems perfect at first, yet these is something is deepely wrong in the background.

The original book that provided the name was about how it couldn't happen without downsides. A perfect society requires perfect people and nobody is born that way, so it sucks to grow up in someone's vision of Utopia. "The Scarlet Letter" and some stuff about the Salem witch trials is about Utopian societies of the past and how much it sucks to not fit into the ideals of the Utopian society. Some of the Arabian city states fit the futuristic Utopia idea already in many ways, but be an outsider in a deal with a local there that goes bad or do something that defies their idea of order, or piss off somebody powerful and things get dark very quickly.

This presumes that people regularly leave the tower, or at least the upper floors of the tower

Yes. Most definitely. If you can't get everyone out in a relatively short time then you have utterly failed as an engineer or architect. It's an assumption considered as important as an aircraft being designed to be able to get off the ground.

Conflict makes for interesting stories - which is why stuff like "Ghost in the Shell" with a future full of amazing things dishes up stories of people using them to commit crimes.

Just look at the US solar efforts

Good point, develop the technology, refine it, then throw it all away because it challenges established industries, leaving China to pick it up as if gift wrapped for them and make money out of it.

Or the German government's solar disaster if you want to see an extreme fail

I haven't heard of that one, how about you show us where to look to see such a disaster?