Brett Raguse (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the comments from the member for New England in terms of his understanding of the needs of his region. I would like to acknowledge that there is a lot of emotion in this particular debate today. We heard the member for Wide Bay talking about Queensland and the lack of infrastructure and a whole range of things. He was a Minister for Transport and Regional Services in a government that was in power for almost 12 years. So what did they do? Let us look at the electorate of Forde, where I come from, a seat that sits behind the Gold Coast—in fact, the member for Moncrieff, sitting over there, is a very proud Gold Coast member. The electorate of Forde at its northern point sits within 40 kilometres of the city of Brisbane. This is an area that you would expect to have a lot of infrastructure in place. I can tell you that even now people have problems getting any type of ADSL simply because a lot of that area has dial-up services. That is at the northern end. My electorate stretches at the southern end to probably 120 kilometres out of the city.

I can tell you that there are still cables running along the side of the road. In fact some of the junction boxes had been eaten by the cattle that also graze that area. So the reality is that the infrastructure we currently have is poor. We can talk about fibre to the node and a whole range of infrastructure. The member for Dunkley talked about the technology that was provided and put in place by the previous government. Well, I can tell you that it did not exist. Their plan for a two-tiered system in fact just will not work, simply because they do not understand the existing infrastructure, and the existing infrastructure that they are depending on just will not work. As I said, this is in the electorate of Forde, which is so close to Brisbane and so close to the Gold Coast, yet our infrastructure is so poor. Just getting some basic phone services in place would be very much welcomed.

In fact, there was emotion from the member for Dunkley. He talked about the ‘spivness’ of the Labor government in wanting to roll out a major fibre network—spivness! He said that we were hairy chested and that these were all weasel words that the government is good at putting out there. I tell you, we are serious about what we are doing. In fact, we went to the election with a commitment to provide the national broadband network. We planned it, we said how we would do it and we promised and committed to a level of rollout.

Looking at the technology behind that, they say it was the Howard government that really made a lot of inroads. That is not true. Let us go back to the Hawke and Keating years. Let us go back to the decision to roll out the fibre networks and introduce Optus as a provider to roll out broadband cable. This is something that previous Labor governments understood very well. In fact, not only was it a case of rolling out the infrastructure but it was also an understanding of this country and its move towards technology—and I am now talking about the early nineties. They said: ‘Okay, we can roll out the technology. The world wide web is now being rolled out around the world. How would we as a country be able to tap into that?’ Essentially, through the rollout of fibre networks, the role of Optus in its early days was all about the initiative of the Labor government to ensure we had adequate infrastructure, particularly for communications and data.

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