Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is certainly education—and, if you are going to interject, I will throw in medicine, too. I know that there is a doctor in Temora, Dr Ash Collins, who is particularly keen to promote e-health in Temora. But the speeds that he has at the moment enable him to do that, and the NBN has not actually hit Temora yet. There are a lot of hospitals in my area that are quite happy with the download speeds that they have now. Medicine in real time is more important in regional areas, where there are far fewer specialists and far fewer doctors than in metropolitan areas. I would like hospitals to prioritise things a little better than they are now, certainly with the public health dollar. That would enable prostate biopsies to be performed in the theatre at Wagga Wagga Base Hospital and palliative care services for Wagga Wagga, which are not happening now.

Getting back to the rollout of the NBN, about 99 per cent of Australia's population has mobile phone coverage. However, 77 per cent of Australia's landmass has no reliable mobile coverage. That, I believe, is a far greater problem than having fibre to the node rolled out to as many premises as are lucky enough to have it. I was speaking to an NBN representative just last week who said that one of the biggest problems was that they were able to do a certain amount of rolling out of the NBN until they hit rocks. The ripping up of lawns and all those sorts of things are causing great distress for a lot of people. If the NBN just went up the main streets of particular towns and cities, certainly throughout regional Australia, you might think that it was not such a bad project. But the fact is that it is not going to towns of fewer than 1,000 premises. It is not being taken up in some areas by people who simply do not want to have to pay the high costs. And certainly we do not want our children and grandchildren to be saddled with a $50 billion debt when we are already $260 billion in debt.

I have been criticised for saying it—and the member for McEwen would probably know the sorts of critics who are out there—but I believe health is No. 1 and education is not too far behind when it comes to priorities for spending of taxpayers' money by the Commonwealth. There was no cost-benefit analysis done of the National Broadband Network before Labor just decided that this would be a good thing. They got on a plane and wrote down a few things on a coaster: 'School halls; that comes before health. What else can we do? Pink batts in roofs would be a good idea. We'll rip people's lawns up and lay this expensive fibre network which a lot of people do not need, or do not want, and cannot afford. But, hey, we'll do it, because we'll not have to worry about how we pay it back. We'll not have to worry. The coalition will do that. We have not produced a surplus since 1989, so why start now?'

An opposition member: Why start now? Why break the habit of a lifetime?

Exactly. Wyatt Roy will be a grandfather—in fact, I do not know whether Wyatt Roy, the member for Longman, will even be with us by the time Labor produces a surplus. And certainly there has not been one produced in his lifetime.

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