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

It is an interesting story. She met her husband in Iraq. He was a member of the South Australian police. They got married, moved to Adelaide and lived in his house in Hillbank. They could not get broadband so she was commuting every week to do her job. These are things that my constituents tell me; they are no laughing matter. For 12 years, the member for Moncrieff and others laughed, joked, denied, obfuscated, delayed and never came up with a solution. They had 18 plans over the years. There was a denial of services and they never got around to fixing the problem. Time and time again they said, ‘There’s a solution, but just wait.’ We know who suffers when this happens. It is people in the suburbs and people in country towns.

I am stunned that members of the National Party would come into this place and say, ‘Just rely on the market to fix the problem. Just rely on some new wonderful technology which the private sector will bring to you.’ We know that that will not happen. We know that delaying, wishing this problem into the never-never and hoping for some future nirvana, is an approach that did not work in the past. It did not work during the Howard years and it is unlikely to work in the future, and that is why those opposite keep losing on this issue. They keep banging on and raising all these objections to the system because they do not have anything positive to say about it, they do not have a record to run on and they do not have a plan for the future. Personally, I think it does not win them one vote and, more importantly, it does not serve their constituents very well.

We had the situation where the National Party were all for this, right up until Barnaby Joyce became their Senate leader. Then he did a complete 180-degree turn and said he was against it. All of sudden there is some spurious reason for not backing it; that is the truth. Why? It is because he is appealing to the short-term conservative thinking of asking, ‘Why would we do this?’ If we listened to those opposite, roads would have been too expensive—the original phone would have been too expensive. They would have been here saying, ‘Why do farmers need phones?’ That is basically the tenor of their argument. And if they were back in Roman times, they would have been saying, ‘Why does the empire need aqueducts; we don’t need aqueducts. Who needs water? Who needs sewerage?’

For every great bit of infrastructure, you could count on the opposition to find some reason to oppose it, to find some reason not to do it, to find some reason to delay it and to find some reason to say, ‘We don’t need it.’ Of course, once it is in put in place, then we will not hear about those issues anymore. They will be the greatest supporters of it ever known, and they will hope that the speeches that they gave in this place with this short-termism, this ostrich-like behaviour, will be ignored. They will hope that they were not seen to be standing in the way of the future.

This government will press on with our legislation. It is important legislation for the future and it is well-balanced legislation for the future. It is legislation that provides the backbone for our important National Broadband Network, a network that will serve all of my constituents well, whether they are in the suburbs or if they are in country towns to the north of Gawler. It is an incredibly important program for this country and I commend it to the House.

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