Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker Bishop, I thank you for the opportunity to be here for these portfolio discussions and consideration in detail. At output 3.4 of the Communications, Information Technology and the Arts portfolio there is a total price for outputs of $13.819 million. Output 3.4 is entitled ‘Strategic advice, activities and representation relating to Australia’s development as an information economy, nationally and internationally’. Amongst the notes in this document for the development of the ICT sector is the following:

... promoting skills development and facilitating infrastructure development (including advanced networks capabilities).

This is something that Labor believes the government has been tardy on. I particularly wish to talk about Labor’s proposal to roll out the next generation broadband infrastructure. But in doing so I say that one of the great problems for an electorate like Scullin, which is on the outer urban fringe of Melbourne to the north, is that we have suburbs and new estates coming on board that will be about 22 kilometres from the CBD and they do not have access to the present broadband ASDL optic fibre that we see as the standard. The point is that Labor is not just talking about rolling that out and providing access. We are talking about next generation which will give access to greater speeds. Of those people in the city of Whittlesea who have a connection to the internet, 53 per cent still have dial-up. That is fairly antiquated.

As an anecdote and slightly by digression, when I was a councillor for the Shire of Whittlesea, one thing I could not work out was why we were not getting the call centres and access to things that were hanging off the copper wire infrastructure which was going to the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The then shire engineer explained to me that our telecommunications infrastructure was not good enough. We have caught up with that 20-year lag. We now have call centres in the north, but we do not have access to the greater optic fibre. We do not have enough exchanges that bring people close enough to use ADSL and we have companies that cannot compete on the global stage simply because they cannot use IT that is comparable to the IT of those whom they are competing against.

I would hope that the government would step back and embrace a holistic approach to nationally rolling out the next generation of broadband infrastructure, to bring all the interested telcos together and say: ‘We really have to organise this better. But it will not happen through competition, because there will be cherry picking of the best markets.’ That is simply unfair to the regions. I know that the parliamentary secretary, representing a distinct region of Victoria, understands the importance of regional efforts.

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