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

I welcome the question. First and foremost, I will get the transcript checked because from dint of long experience I know that claims made by the opposition do need to be checked and checked extensively. Second, I would say to the member who asked the question that anybody who has seen the minister for communications talk about the National Broadband Network—talk about it in detail at length; talk about its technical capabilities, sometimes at extraordinary length—would know that he is a man who is fully conversant with the National Broadband Network, how it is being delivered and what it can do.

But I would also say to the member: this is the Parliament of Australia, where we are supposed to be focusing on the issues that most matter to the nation’s future. When a transcript about an individual interview is a thing of the past, what will matter to this nation’s future is the power and capacity of the infrastructure that we are proposing in the National Broadband Network. Once again my challenge to the opposition is to stop dancing around the substance of the debate and actually get up and justify why you want Australia to have a fourth-, fifth-, sixth- or seventh-rate solution to our National Broadband Network needs. Why do you want to export jobs to Korea and Singapore so that they will be done by people there, rather than by Australians? Why do you want to deny Australians the service innovation in health and education that will come from the National Broadband Network? Why do you want to deny Australians the benefits of the GDP growth that will come from the National Broadband Network? Why do you want to deny Australians the price advantages of having competition in the retail network? Why do you want to take all of these things away? Now the reality of this debate when we strip it all down—

See this speech in context