Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The motion in question purports to be about a cost-benefit analysis for the government’s exciting proposal to roll out a National Broadband Network. Whenever the words ‘cost’, ‘benefit’ and ‘analysis’ are included in a proposal, they have a superficial sheen of credibility. Unfortunately, in this instance what undermines that superficial sheen of credibility is that the proponents of the motion spent most of their time in the last parliament criticising the government for conducting endless rounds of reviews and establishing committees on everything that we proposed to do and not getting on with the job of implementing our policies. Indeed, the members opposite have spent a great deal of their time over the last three years criticising our action on rolling out the National Broadband Network. In my own area, the member for Gilmore has gone to print on several occasions criticising the government for not yet having the suburbs of that electorate already wired up. Its credibility is undermined even further by the fact that it comes from a party whose leader has dedicated himself to the task of ensuring that this National Broadband Network never gets built.

We can see from all of this that it is not about the costs and the benefits but it is about opposition, it is about blocking, it is about sowing the seeds of doubt in the electorate. It is a tactic, because those opposite know that, if they were ever able to occupy the treasury bench and if they were to set themselves about their task of digging up the National Broadband Network and its kilometres of fibre-optic cable, the Australian people would criticise them and condemn them roundly, so their only choice is to stop it dead in its tracks.

We stand here opposing this plan and all the ruses and guises which are a part of the tactics to deliver that policy objective. We stand for rolling out broadband, and it matters a lot. The National Broadband Network is as important to the economic development of Australia in the 21st century as the railways were to the economic development of this country in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yes, the NBN is about entertainment and home users and residential users, but it is about much more than that. It is about enhancing productivity. It is about ensuring that we can deliver state-of-the-art health and medical procedures to those people who live in regional Australia—regions that are represented by many members opposite—people who live in regions such as mine in the electorate of Throsby, delivering first-class health and education services to people who do not live in the capital cities of this country. Quite simply, it is critical for regional Australia.

In my own electorate each week about 20,000 people crowd the train platforms of the suburbs to make a daily journey to the CBD of Sydney in pursuit of work. The National Broadband Network is their opportunity to spend less time on those trains and less time on those freezing cold train platforms at five and six o’clock in the morning, and a little more time in their homes and in workplaces closer to their homes. It is critical for small businesses, which those opposite often purport to represent, but does little to ensure that small businesses have the infrastructure which makes them viable. In the electorate of Throsby, over 67 per cent of the small businesses are home based small businesses, and the National Broadband Network is critical to connecting those businesses to the markets of Australia and the world.

The National Broadband Network is already attracting exciting investment in the electorate of Throsby, on the South Coast and Southern Highlands of New South Wales. I was delighted this morning to read an article in the Illawarra Mercury where the journalist was reporting on an exciting investment by an Indian IT company, which is a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, which has announced that it will be establishing a new information and communications technology centre in the innovation campus of the University of Wollongong. This will employ around 250 people in an electorate like Throsby, which has a great university but does not always have the employment opportunities that will attract and retain the graduates. Investments like these will make an enormous difference to my electorate. I am very excited because the investors in this new facility specifically cited the National Broadband Network and the opportunities for early rollout of the National Broadband Network in the Illawarra region as one of their reasons for choosing the Illawarra and the University of Wollongong as their site for investment and development. This is a factor which is also reported in an article in the Australian Financial Review under the headline ‘NBN stimulates investment in research’.

I support the continuation of these exciting investments and I know that the people of my electorate do as well. We have been advised by NBN Co. that in the areas which are identified for early rollout and where cable is currently being rolled out past the suburbs on the South Coast of New South Wales, in places like Minnamurra and Kiama Downs, over two-thirds of the eligible households have put their hand up and said, ‘Yes, please, I want to be connected to this National Broadband Network.’ So it is not only businesses but also individuals that see the enormous benefits of the NBN for a regional electorate like Throsby.

Australians have suffered and waited a long time for the NBN. Under the previous, coalition government there were something in the order of 18 failed plans for broadband. In fact, you could characterise the coalition’s policy on broadband as a vacant field. They had only one policy, and that was a policy for privatising Telstra. They had no policy for dealing with the consequences of privatising such a large near-monopoly provider. So there were over 18 failed broadband plans over a 12-year period and now they have the temerity to come to this place and attempt to put more and more roadblocks in the way of us rolling out one of Australia’s most important pieces of nation-building infrastructure.

They talk about the importance of a cost-benefit analysis. I just say this. We have had a cost analysis, the $25 million McKinsey report which said that the National Broadband Network can be delivered within the cost envelope proposed by the government. As to the benefits of the NBN, the people of my electorate know them full well, and I believe the people of Australia have got a pretty good eye for what the benefits of this proposal are too, because this proposal has gone before no fewer than two elections. We took a proposal to build a national broadband network to the 2007 election and the Australian people saw the benefits of it and voted for it. We took this specific proposal to the 2010 election and those opposite made it one of the foci of their opposition during that campaign, and once again they failed to win the support of the Australian people. So when it comes to the cost-benefit analysis, we have had enough of committees, enough of reviews. I think the people of Throsby and the people of Australia just want us to get on with the job.

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