Darren Cheeseman (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very grateful to be given the opportunity to address the issues in this particular appropriation. I can recall being elected in 2007 and getting around my electorate of Corangamite and speaking to many of my communities. Of course, my seat covers 7,000 square kilometres and has many communities that for a very, very substantial period of time have not been able to access decent internet speeds. As a consequence, many kids who are studying year 12 classes cannot email projects from their schools to their homes so as to work on them in the evening. Nor can they, at the end of their evening studies, email them back to school so that they can have the material ready for when they return to school. When I talk to many of my colleagues from regional Australia they report the same things. Regional Australia has been very much isolated in many regards from the benefits that come from having reliable, decent internet.

Of course, when I was talking to those communities in the lead-up to the 2007 election and through the course of the last parliamentary term and the last election, many communities raised with me the National Broadband Network and asked what benefits might be provided to them in a practical sense by having the National Broadband Network deployed. I can report that there have been a number of visits from key groups within my community to parliament to talk to the government and to talk to the National Broadband Network company to raise with them the very tremendous opportunities that having reliable, high-speed broadband will provide to regional Australia and, indeed, to my region of greater Geelong. They certainly report to me tremendous business opportunities that will come.

Of course, when we look at the alternative policies it appears to me that there is no alternative policy being articulated by the other side. Indeed, the National Broadband Network problems within my electorate were allowed to be developed under the Howard government, who could not manage to hold onto any plan for any length of time. In fact, there was a new plan almost every year, each of which failed dismally.

Minister, I am very curious to hear your views of the benefits that might ultimately come to regional Australia, particularly electorates like mine, where we have many communities that are spread out over a large area. What opportunities might there be for new technologies to be deployed in areas like my seat? I have a very vibrant tourism economy, and tourism economies sell their wares through the internet. Many of my tourism operators cannot trade overseas through the internet as a consequence of having very poor or unreliable broadband. So I am curious to know, from your perspective, how the National Broadband Network might assist seats and communities like mine in taking advantage of superfast broadband.

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