Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On any assessment the Howard government have completely botched the implementation of a comprehensive broadband plan designed to take this nation into the future and enhance our prospects for productivity growth into the future. It is perfectly obvious that the Prime Minister, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and the minister at the table, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, just do not understand the technology, let alone the importance of decent broadband services to secure our economic future. It is not just the implementation of broadband that the government have had major problems with in the communications portfolio—problems of their own making, I might add. When you look at the complete fiasco they made of the implementation of digital television and radio, it is little wonder they failed to grasp and botched the broadband implementation so comprehensively.

2006 ACCC figures prove Australia is falling even further behind in the implementation of acceptable broadband services. For example, the September 2006 broadband snapshot released by the ACCC is just one example of the Howard government’s constant failure of leadership on broadband and its potential effect in lifting productivity. Those ACCC figures illustrated the third consecutive quarterly fall of Australia’s entry-level broadband growth rate in 2006.

Australian broadband take-up grew by only 9.3 per cent in the September 2006 quarter compared to growth of 10.5 per cent and 12.6 per cent in preceding quarters. Last year, the nation’s broadband growth rate was barely good enough for Australia to retain its lowly ranking of 17th out of 30 developed countries surveyed by the OECD. The continuing fall in Australia’s broadband growth rate raises the prospect that we will now fall even further behind our international peers in this important area.

Australia’s broadband growth rates of recent times have come off an extremely low base. The ACCC report confirms that Australia’s broadband growth rate has plateaued and is now falling. On top of this, as Labor has pointed out in the past, the ACCC’s figures measure only the take-up of entry-level broadband. As a result, these figures hide Australia’s even worse performance in the take-up of multimegabit broadband caused by the country’s antiquated broadband infrastructure.

Australia needs a nation-building investment in broadband infrastructure to bring the country back into line with our international competitors and maximise the potential for dramatically increasing productivity for our small businesses. In contrast to the Howard government’s complacency on broadband, Labor has been playing a leadership role in the Australian telecommunications infrastructure debate. Labor has a plan for delivering world-class telecommunications infrastructure for all Australians. Labor’s nation-building broadband initiative will revolutionise Australia’s internet infrastructure by creating a new world-class national broadband network. Labor will invest up to $4.7 billion to establish the national broadband network in partnership with the private sector. This will be over a five-year period.

Part of this initiative involves Labor acknowledging that our policy of no further sale of the remaining 17 per cent of Telstra is now obsolete because the Howard government has a majority in the Senate and has used and will continue to use that majority to implement its ideological obsession with privatisation. As someone who will always oppose the privatisation of our essential services like communications, I am bitterly disappointed that we lost the fight to retain ownership of the majority of Telstra by the Commonwealth government and therefore the Australian people. However, Labor is committed to building for the future rather than fighting over the past. This means delivering high-speed broadband that is accessible and available to virtually all Australians to build the economy for the future and to deliver more economic growth, higher productivity and higher tax revenue to sustain us into the future—initiatives that are critical to the interests of our children and the long-term interests of the nation and essential to lifting our prospects for productivity growth.

This initiative is necessary to boost productivity growth and build long-term economic prosperity once the mining boom is over. Together with federal Labor’s education revolution, the national broadband network plan will provide a platform to build and expand Australian business. The national broadband network will connect 98 per cent of Australians to high-speed broadband internet services at a speed more than 40 times faster than most current speeds. Federal Labor will increase the speed to a minimum of 12 megabits per second, and this means that business, education and household services on the internet, including entertainment, will happen in real time.

The remaining two per cent of Australians, in regional and remote areas not covered by this network, will have improved broadband services. Nation building in the 19th century meant building a national rail network and the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme. Nation building in the 21st century means building a national broadband network, and that is precisely what a future Rudd Labor government will do.

Currently, Australia is 25th in the world for available internet bandwidth, behind Slovenia and the Slovak Republic. If we are to remain globally competitive, we must address this as an absolute priority, and that is precisely what Labor is doing. The new services and benefits of the network, particularly in rural and regional areas, include reduced telephone bills for small business; enhanced business services, such as teleconferencing, video conferencing and virtual private networks; enhanced capacity for services such as e-education and e-health; and high-definition, multichannel and interactive television services.

A new national broadband network is critical to building the platform for economic growth, productivity and prosperity. It is estimated that the new network would deliver the national economic benefits I have just mentioned and also up to $30 billion in additional national economic activity a year. It will make Australian small businesses more competitive, create new international and domestic markets for businesses and new jobs for Australians and provide greater media diversity. Essentially, Labor’s plan will partner with private sector contributors to deliver the national network, undertake a competitive assessment of proposals from telecommunications companies that already have a record on the board, ensure competition in the sector through an open access network that provides equivalence of access, charges and scope for access seekers to differentiate between product offerings, and put in place regulatory reforms to ensure up-front certainty for all investors.

A range of domestic and international studies have reinforced the potential for broadband to stimulate economic growth. The national broadband network will be funded by using existing government investments in communications to provide a public equity investment of up to $4.7 billion in the new broadband network. This will include drawing on the $2 billion regional Communications Fund and the Future Fund’s 17 per cent share in Telstra which, consistent with the legislated position, will earn dividends and be sold down to a normal level over time after November 2008. This broadband revolution is a huge win for small businesses, students and personal computer users across the nation and will change Australian business and computing forever. This will be the greatest national investment in improving information and communications technology and broadband internet access in this nation’s history. This pioneering and much needed initiative will bring enormous benefits to central Victoria and all other regional centres across Australia.

As a former small business operator relying on the information technology field, I know and understand the frustration of small businesses in attempting to access useable internet speeds. But it is not just small businesses in central Victoria that will benefit; the ability for students to access the internet at reasonable speeds will enhance their education to a level that will enable them to function at a much higher potential throughout their working lives. The benefits for the delivery of medical services are almost unlimited, especially throughout rural and remote areas. This bold plan has benefits for each and every Australian, whether they live in our capital cities or in the most remote regions in Australia.

The sheer magnitude of this imaginative and vital piece of infrastructure will deliver this nation a project that could only be compared with the legendary Snowy Mountains hydro electricity project in its importance and benefit for all Australians. It will be the most vital piece of infrastructure for many decades and only Labor has the vision to outline and implement this and other policies so essential to the wellbeing of each and every Australian in both current and future generations.

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