Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Given that I have two minutes, I will now enter the debate, make some comments with respect to this motion and respond to some of the comments made by the member for Hinkler. This motion is a very important motion. I am glad that the member for Blaxland placed it on the Notice Paper.

It is very important that, when we talk about broadband, we define our terms. Of course, what we have to define as much as anything else is the speed at which broadband access is delivered. I think it is pertinent in this debate, when we refer to broadband access, to be mindful of the vast gap between the slowest and fastest fixed broadband speeds. By way of example, in South Korea the majority of the population already has access to speeds of about 24 megabits. By contrast, Australia has about 3½ million households with access to broadband, but 80 per cent of them are at low speeds of less than 512 kilobits a second. In other words, we are far behind South Korea. Only five per cent of the households of our population have access to 24 megabits.

It is that issue of speed as well as access that has to enter the debate, and the government has to become serious about this particular matter. The Leader of the Opposition was quite right when he said that Australia is left ‘trundling along on an IT goat track when the rest of the world is on an information superhighway’. In any comparison of the OECD nations, Australia is clearly behind the majority of them. It is about time the government acted. (Time expired)

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