Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

deplores the totally inadequate nature of Australia’s current broadband communications infrastructure;

(2)

denounces the Howard Government’s piecemeal dithering with broadband over the past ten years;

(3)

declares that Australia should be a world leader in broadband communications along with the Netherlands and South Korea, rather than one of the last to take up fast broadband; and

(4)

demands a modern, 21st Century, national broadband communications infrastructure for Australia, as set out in federal Labor’s broadband plan to build a fast network for the whole of Australia.

Paragraphs 1 and 2, which deplore what we currently have and denounce the Howard government’s inability to deal with the issue, go to the very core of our problem. Australia is a complete and utter laughing stock comparatively when you look at broadband take-up and what the government has done to amend the problem. If you look at the OECD rankings, Australia is 17th out of 30 countries surveyed by the OECD to take up 256 kilobits broadband. That is unchanged from last year because this government is simply not committed to providing the infrastructure that Australia needs for the present and the future.

According to the World Economic Forum, Australia ranks 25th in terms of available internet bandwidth; Australia’s network readiness is 15th and falling. A recent World Bank study confirms that Australia’s average ADSL speed of barely one megabit per second is one of the slowest in the world behind countries like Britain with 13 megabits per second, France with 8.4 megabits per second, Germany with 6.85 megabits per second and Canada with 6.8 megabits per second.

In the modern age, speed is everything. Currently every member of this parliament has the capacity to access the internet by broadband wherever they are in Australia. What were they allowed to have? Initially it was 28 kilobits per second. What were they allowed to have up until very recently? The absolute minimum if you are talking real broadband is 256 kilobits per second; it has just been doubled to 512 kilobits per second. What is the reality for most of Australia? People are at 256 kilobits per second or lower. It is possible that you could have a minimum of 1.5 megabits per second or faster—over 10 megabits per second—using the current infrastructure of copper and ADSL2 and if much faster units were put into Telstra’s exchanges. This should be across the board if the government provided all of the infrastructure, but they have not.

Telstra—Australia’s biggest company—has done absolutely nothing to enter the fast broadband area. Instead it is regional Australia and companies like iiNet and iPrimus that have taken advantage of future speed and provided that to people for the same amount of money that it costs them for much slower services. Labor has seen what the situation is, looked at the past 10 years of government dithering and put forward a broadband plan for now and the future. Upon coming to government in 2007, Kim Beazley has indicated that by the time our first term is completed in 2010 we will provide a fast broadband service based on fibre to the node and DSLAMs which give ADSL2+ access so that the minimum access speed that 98 per cent of Australians should enjoy is six megabits per second, with most people enjoying much more.

What does that allow? It allows video on demand. It allows people, wherever they are in Australia, to run their businesses with fast internet access. It allows a revolutionising of Australia’s broadband access and the sorts of things you can do with the internet. It allows Australia to catch up to South Korea, which already has an immense infrastructure provided by its government. It allows us to catch up to the Netherlands, which has gone from fibre to the node completely to fibre to the home. Fast internet access through fast broadband is absolutely essential for a modern, 21st century government infrastructure. We deserve it and Labor will give it.

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