Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

That is one of the reasons that I opposed the tax increase that the Leader of the Opposition wanted to put on everything that families buy at the last election. I thought that that was wrong. I do not know if the member thought it was right or wrong for the Leader of the Opposition to take a big tax on everything to the last election—a tax that would have flowed through to prices in Coles and Woolworths. I thought that that was the wrong thing to do, but she might want to express her own view about that, given her concern about the cost of living and families.

On the National Broadband Network, what I would say to the member who asked the question is that you do not want to fall for the spin coming from your frontbench about the National Broadband Network. I refer the member to the studies that have already been released—the McKinsey Implementation Study, for example—about the National Broadband Network. I refer her to the many business and academic studies that show the productivity, service delivery and innovation advantages of the NBN and the projected growth in our GDP and the increased prosperity for Australians as a result of this new technology.

I say to the member who asked the question that if she is really concerned about prices and families, she would be vitally concerned about the question of whether or not mum or dad has a job. The issue with the National Broadband Network is this: if we allow the technology of this country to continue to fall behind, then what will effectively happen is that we will export jobs to countries with better technology, such as Singapore and Korea. We would export jobs that would have supported working families and enabled them to pay their bills.

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