Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am amazed that the member for Makin can claim that the Howard government failed to roll out a national broadband network when it was the Howard government that signed the OPEL contract to deliver fast broadband to 99 per cent of Australians by June of this year. It would have already been in place if we were in government. We would already have a fast broadband network. Instead, the Rudd government cancelled the OPEL contract, which was going to deliver incredibly fast services all around Australia, to 99 per cent of Australians. Instead, the Rudd and Conroy pipedream will spend $43 billion without a business plan and without a cost-benefit analysis. Talk about amateurs! They went to the last election with a plan that they said would cover 98 per cent of Australians for $4.7 billion, and we have ended up with a $43 billion plan to cover only 90 per cent of Australians. Guess which 10 per cent of Australians will miss out? It will be those people in rural areas in electorates like mine of Barker. The member for Makin also just spruiked a so-called solution for a black spot in his metropolitan seat. Can I inform the member for Makin: fixing black spots in metropolitan areas is relatively simple.

Let me inform the member for Makin that the OPEL contract would have delivered 38 high-speed WiMAX base stations in my electorate, with a further seven exchanges upgraded to ADSL II-plus, and they would have already been in place, serving 21,904 underserved positions. Those positions are still in place. They are still underserved by this government—and it has been in government now for nearly two years. Let me also inform the member for Makin and those on the opposite side that I can use the example of Murray Bridge, where I actually live. Murray Bridge is a reasonably large city of about 18,000 people. It is only about 70 kilometres out of Adelaide. It is the second or third largest city outside of Adelaide in South Australia. In my subdivision, which is called Pathways, because I was the second person to move into that subdivision some 2½ years ago I got the last ADSL II-plus spot left available in that subdivision. Since then we have probably had about 100 houses built in that subdivision, and they are going up at a rate of about one a week. And guess what. Even two years later, after the election of the Rudd government, there is still no ADSL II-plus in a subdivision that has been going for about three years—and, of course, two years served by this government. So things have not improved one iota under this government. All we are left with is a plan to spend $43 billion, a plan which will not work and is not feasible. Nobody is going to be paying $200 a month for that extra service when they can get quite capable WiMAX service in many places around Australia.

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network Measures—Network Information) Bill 2009 amends the Telecommunications Act 1997 to provide for network information to be provided by telecommunications carriers and other utilities to the Commonwealth for the planned rollout of the National Broadband Network. Just over two years ago I was pleased to support the Howard government’s Australia Connected broadband initiative. It would have been in place now serving my constituents and constituents all around Australia. The centrepiece was the immediate rollout of a new competitive state-of-the-art broadband network that would have extended high-speed services to 99 per cent of the population and provided speeds of 12 megabits per second by 2009. I have no doubt that technological advances would have increased that speed quite quickly, because that is the way of the broadband networks around the world. It would have enabled high-speed broadband carriage across the entire electorate of Barker, an electorate that is bigger than Tasmania. It is 64,000 square kilometres and all of it would have been covered—and it would have been covered now.

But, as a result of this government, there is no extra coverage that we can actually boast of. That two years would have been up by now and my constituents, who have long dealt with unreliable dial-up or impossibly expensive and often fairly slow satellite broadband, would have been able to effectively communicate in business, medical, education and family matters. The Howard government would have spent just $958 million, less than $1 billion, on this new network, and funding would have been complemented by $907 million from the network builder OPEL, a joint venture between Optus and Elders. It would have been in place for about $2 billion. But here we have this government boasting about a $43 billion plan that will not work because it is not cost effective. Everyone in my electorate of Barker would have benefited from the Australia Connected initiative. Those working in our hospitals and schools, families who use the internet to keep in touch with loved ones and our businesspeople who use it to contact their customers and suppliers and to find new markets for their products would have, could have and should have but have not, thanks to the Rudd government. Instead, the Rudd Labor government has welched on its core election promise to provide fast broadband to regional Australia, leaving more than two million people outside its latest broadband announcement. Those two million people are from rural and regional Australia. More than 22,000 are from my electorate. More than 22,000 will not get serviced by this pipedream of a plan. Despite the expenditure of $43 billion of taxpayers’ money, one million regional Australian households will end up with less than they would have got under the cancelled OPEL contract and will get it many years later. Regional Australia will miss out or have to wait years longer than anyone else and, at best, receive broadband one-eighth as fast as in the cities. There are 22,000 people in my electorate who will never receive high-speed fibre-to-the-premise broadband services, all because they live in towns with fewer than 1,000 people. Towns in my electorate which will miss out include Beachport, Blanchetown, Cadell, Callington, Cobdogla, Coonalpyn, Kalangadoo, Karoonda, Lameroo, Lucindale, Meningie, Morgan, Mount Burr, Nangwarry, Paringa, Pinnaroo, Port MacDonnell, Swan Reach, Tantanoola, Tarpeena, Tintinara, Truro and others.

We are not talking about outback towns. Some of these are just over an hour from Adelaide. This is another broken election promise: to deliver fibre to the node to 98 per cent of all Australians. We knew it would not work and I suspect they knew it would not work. The Rudd Labor government is cementing in place a two-speed economy—fast for cities and slow for the bush. The Howard government, in contrast, signed off on $958 million for the OPEL contract to provide fast broadband to regional Australia. We also put another $2.4 billion into the Communications Fund to future-proof those services and provide further upgrades. In metropolitan areas where there is strong competition, existing commercial providers were willing to build the fast broadband network. Instead, under Labor, the money put aside for regional Australia has been taken away and replaced with $250 million to extend fibre-optic cable to a small number of regional centres. The end result is that regional and rural small business, households and students—who are already hit by this government under the youth allowance changes—will not gain the broadband access they were promised at the last election and will continue to struggle for years with unreliable and slow internet.

Rural and regional Australians have clearly been excluded from Labor’s communications revolution. They have been dudded by the Rudd government. Two-thirds of the way through this government’s term, Labor has done nothing to improve broadband services in rural and regional Australia. If anything, it has made the situation worse, cancelling OPEL and dissolving the $2.4 billion Communications Fund, which was an in-perpetuity fund to provide improved services to regional and rural Australia. Rural and regional Australians no longer have this, thanks to the Rudd government.

Earlier this week I spoke in this place about the lack of response from the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy on digital television services to areas of my electorate. I said that the failure of the Labor government to fund the upgrade of retransmission towers from analog to digital transmission was just another example of a city-centric federal government. Many rural and regional Australians will miss out on television altogether—in areas less than 100 kilometres from Adelaide. That is a communications failure if ever there was one.

I also recall the situation with analog telephones when we first came into government in 1996. Many of the rural areas in my electorate were left without any sort of mobile phone service because the previous Keating Labor government made no attempt to help those people in rural areas, who often used analog phones because they had a greater service capability than digital phones. We had to come in and fix the problem that Labor had left us, which we did by introducing CDMA telephone services.

The National Broadband Network is yet another example showing that Labor governments do not care about regional Australia, and that goes for state and federal governments. Rural and regional Australia, and certainly my electorate, not only provides us with some of the best food in the world and, of course, the best wine in the world but also supports thousands of food manufacturing and processing jobs as well as generating billions of dollars of export revenue. When rural and regional Australia needed our help as the drought went on, it got a slap in the face through cancellation of exceptional circumstances funding in parts of my electorate.

When the Labor Party needs to make cuts it is the usual victims who get hit—the self-funded retirees, people with private health care, businesses, exporters and, of course, those who live outside the capital cities. They copped a $1 billion hit in last year’s budget—and that was in good times—and they copped it again in this year’s budget.

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