Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take your point, Mr Deputy Speaker. The member for Wentworth was back in the harness—and that is a good thing for his party, no doubt—but his marching orders were to destroy this valuable national piece of infrastructure. It is extraordinary that they should be so utterly honest about their commitment to do this. We just have to remember what is at stake here. There is a great deal at stake in terms of the new economy, e-health, e-education, small business opportunities and productivity. At the moment we rank 29th out of 50 countries. We have an average connection speed of 2.6 megabits per second and no Australian city is in the top 100 cities in the world for average internet connection speed. So we have a situation where we have been left with this legacy of inaction, this legacy of failure. We are trying to fix it up and, every chance they get, the member for Wentworth and the Liberal Party decide to obstruct this valuable piece of infrastructure.

We know it is valuable in so many ways. The Centre for International Economics found that it could increase GDP by 1.4 per cent after just five or six years, and that it will deliver speeds for both uploading and downloading, which is a particular feature of a fibre network. We know that it will create some 25,000 jobs just in infrastructure, just in building this great national network. We know that this is the Snowy Mountains scheme of the 21st century. It is of vital national importance.

We have to contrast that great nation-building program with the opposition’s policy, which is delay and inaction. Just like they delayed in government, they now seek to delay us in implementing our policy, a policy that has found favour with the Australian people, a policy that will deliver important economic and social benefits to people in my electorate. People in my electorate are on the front line of this problem in many ways. Adelaide has some of the worst infrastructure. A lot of pair gains were put in suburbs that were expanding in the late eighties and early nineties. We have a lot of country towns in my electorate. Many of them have people commuting on the Northern Expressway, which is a piece of infrastructure that was completed before time and on budget, an infrastructure project in which 14 per cent of workers were either Indigenous or young workers, giving those people a start in civil construction.

What we want to do is to create the same type of infrastructure program with the National Broadband Network, something that will create jobs, build economic growth and deliver vast social benefits to this country. That is something that does not just benefit Labor voters or independent voters; it will benefit coalition voters. So it is just bizarre that they should stand in the way of this important bit of national infrastructure, that the member for Wentworth should be given just one job—that is, to demolish the NBN. It really is, I think, an extraordinary act of economic vandalism. It is an extraordinary act of vandalism to the national interest and I urge opposition members to think carefully about what they are doing. It is not in their interests, ultimately, and it is certainly not in the country’s interests to prevent this National Broadband Network from proceeding.

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