Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps the member for New England would like to support me in this as well. It is wrong. What is Labor’s position on broadband? Summed up in a nutshell: it is to spend public money providing broadband speeds to everybody in Australia. If that means running a fibre-optic cable up every gum tree in the country, that is what Labor will do. That is Labor’s commitment, but it is a nonsense. Telecommunications is expanding and changing so rapidly these days that new technologies are constantly becoming available. I remind you that it was only four years ago that Labor was pushing 40 kilobytes per second dial-up internet as the way of the future. By the time we get around to doing the things that this bill is proposed to fund, things will have changed yet again. These days, dial-up internet is a dinosaur. They do not even have a computer anymore that will perform the dial-up function. That is the way of the world as things move faster and faster with new technology.

We have seen the advent of wireless technology, where large areas can be serviced from a single-base station cell. That wireless technology can be WiMAX or it can be Next G. Already Next G is available in 98 per cent of the country. You can get fast broadband speeds now. The only place that you cannot service with this technology—perhaps two per cent of the country—is the back of Bourke.

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