Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to stand to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Submarine Cable Protection) Bill 2013 and the amendments moved by the shadow Treasurer. Submarine cables have been around for a while, as a previous speaker said. In fact, they were first laid in the 1850s, long before we were talking about fibre. They went to fibre in the 1980s, when fibre was found to be the best, fastest, most long-lived and expandable option.

I have to say that it is probably just as well that the current minister was not the minister then, because I suspect we would have stayed with copper at that time, or perhaps gone fibre to the low watermark and copper from there. Instead of that, we have an extraordinary submarine cable network around the world that allows for the transmission of data and communications between continents at an incredibly rapid rate with the highest possible standard of technology. We heard the minister speak about the wonders of fibre when it comes to submarine cable protection, but we have also heard him in many forums talk about the fact that, once that fibre gets to Australia an old, ageing copper network is good enough.

I want to talk today about how the minister's decision not to go with fibre to the home affects some of the people and the small businesses in my electorate. I want to talk first about a young woman in my electorate called Gretta. She is an extraordinary young woman. She has cerebral palsy. She has very little movement. She is very smart. When I first met her, she had just graduated from high school and she wanted to go to university but was having trouble because she could not get there—she needed quite sophisticated transport because of the weight of her chair. We managed to fix that with some personal plans, which we introduced as a federal government. But Gretta talked at length about the dreams that she had as a young woman, and the thing that I learned from Gretta is that, for people like her, we are at a point in time which is like an alignment of the planets.

Gretta, like so many young people around the country, has an iPad. It has the brand-new swipe technology which Gretta, even with her limited movement, can use; in fact, she operates it with her nose. She has wi-fi on her chair and, when she is at various places around the city, she can actually communicate verbally through her iPad. It is quite remarkable. And I have seen four- and five-year-old children who are not verbal do the same thing with iPads. It is this new technology which the commercial world has provided which changes the ability of a person in such circumstances to communicate and puts them on a completely different playing field to the one they were on before. On top of that, there is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which provides a person like Gretta with the opportunity for flexibility in the way her support is given—and her decision to use that support to go to university is an example of that.

And then there is the possibility of fibre to the home. For a person like Gretta, that gives her smart-house technology. It gives her back-to-base monitoring. It allows her to turn on her air-conditioning. It allows her to open her front door without having to ask her mum to do it for her. It provides a level of independence in ways that we really have not thought of yet because we are just coming to terms with the possibilities of fibre-to-the-home technology.

If those three things come together, it means the life that a person like Gretta, or a person born tomorrow in Gretta's circumstances, will live will be profoundly different from the life that Gretta has had until now. These are life-changing years that Australia faces at the moment for people like Gretta and for many, many others. The possibility of delivering speech therapy to people in regional areas, Auslan interpreters in schools in remote towns, back-to-base monitoring of medical conditions—there are an incredible range of possibilities that the NBN could provide to a whole range of people that would profoundly change their lives.

The election of the Liberal government and their extraordinary short-sightedness in believing that the copper network will do anything like this is a real blow to a whole range of people whose lives could be profoundly different if this government went along with the kinds of decisions that governments overseas are taking.

We can also see, of course, the many opportunities for business in Australia if we had fibre to the home. All over the world, in markets much bigger than ours, governments are getting ahead of us in terms of broadband speeds, and when that happens there is innovation from a whole range of people who dream—from entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and just people in their houses. My neighbour has turned his house into a 'cloud' now, because the NBN actually reached his suburb. He has now created a cloud business in his home. The emergence of cloud style businesses and software all around the world is an indication that the rest of the world is taking on a situation where people can communicate with each other through fibre from wherever they are.

We talked about this in business 35 or 40 years ago. In fact, in the late eighties, I gave a few lectures on the possibility of fibre and I ducted my business, when we renovated, for fibre. I was ready! But we talked then about the possibility of people in one country working alongside people in another, of businesses literally crossing the oceans through fibre—under the oceans and into our homes and businesses—and allowing a form of collaboration and a level of entrepreneurial activity which we are yet to see but we are just beginning to get to. The development of this cloud based software is an indication that that is the way the world is going.

In a country the size of Australia, if we go down the Liberal path, where it is fibre to the home if you can afford it but not for the rest, we will not get the critical mass that will drive the innovation from our entrepreneurs and our businesses that will allow Australia to be part of this new world. It is not right that this government thinks it is okay that we import the best ideas from the rest of the world but do not provide circumstances in Australia where businesses can develop their own. In fact, for a government that believes it has a plan for the future and believes it is about business to turn its back on one of the biggest growth areas for business in the world is quite extraordinary.

You can see that, even dealing with businesses now. I recently drove down the highway towards Cooma, heading to a state park for a bit of a camping weekend, and I drove through a small town called Bemboka. I stopped at an art gallery not far off the main road—this is a main road between two reasonable sized centres not far from Canberra—where I decided to buy some pieces of pottery that a local potter had made, and the poor man that owned the gallery took half an hour to get his credit card machine to work by mobile. He ended up going out into the yard to get a signal that would last long enough to do a credit card transaction so that I could buy something. I stayed there for half an hour after I had decided what to buy. That is how long it took to buy it. What chance does that business have? That business, by the way, is two kilometres from the main road, so I think perhaps his connection charge would be slightly more than the $5,000 average that we are hearing about. But what chance does that business have—what chance does that community have, actually—to grow in the modern world, when you cannot easily do a credit card transaction in your small business, in a town a couple of hours from Canberra on a main road? That is an outrageous position to be in.

For a government that pretends to care about regional areas, not to have fibre to the home as its priority is quite extraordinary. People who live in regional areas a long way from the footpath, a long way from that box, will have to find thousands of dollars in order to connect to what should be a right in this country. We have an incredibly short-sighted government which does not seem to understand the possibilities of this new technology. It seems to think that all we are talking about is what we already do with our slow speeds—movies, a bit of texting, a bit of communication, a bit of skyping. That is not the world we are entering. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about making sure that entrepreneurs and businesses in this country can take advantage of who we are. We are one of the great innovative countries of the world. We produce scientific papers and inventions above our weight. We are extraordinary thinkers. We are flexible and we problem solve in an extraordinary way. We are not as good at investing in ourselves, but we come up with answers at a rate that the rest of the world does not. We are an exceptionally inventive country.

At a time when the world is becoming increasingly connected and true globalisation—which is that your inputs, labour, everything , particularly in the service economy, comes from wherever it is and is linked through modern technology into a virtual business—is beginning to happen in a real way around the world, just look at who we are. Come to my electorate, any of you, and you will see an area where there is not a single language we do not speak. We speak every language in Parramatta. There is not a country we do not know; there is not a culture we are not familiar with; there is not a city we cannot drive through without a map. We have a population in this country that can work and collaborate with people in any country in the world. The only thing that stops us from doing that to the full extent of our capacity is our slow, outdated communications technology.

It is quite shameful that the previous Liberal government did not act on this, that in 13 years the previous Liberal government did not consider that it was important to upgrade our technology in the way we needed to. It is particularly shameful now, when the rest of the world is moving so fast in this area, that our newly elected government, which thinks it is for the future and thinks it represents small business, does not bother to make sure that we have the technology we need to benefit from who we are.

Also, we are sitting on the edge of the fastest growing region in the world. There is no doubt that, just as our northern neighbours are starting to overtake us in their focus on education, they are also overtaking us in the speed of communications technology and the accessibility of it to their populations. In a very short period it will become apparent even to those opposite that we will have squandered the time that we need to make sure we are in the most competitive position. I would ask the government to consider seriously the approach it is taking to this incredibly important area.

I come from an arts background. For me, it is never about what you can do; it is not even about what you can imagine; it is about making sure that you strive for things you cannot yet imagine; it is about making sure that the people with the smartest minds, with the greatest ideas and with the greatest of entrepreneurial flair can use those talents for the benefit of the community. On this side of the House we know that the Grettas of the world need this technology to live a better life. We know that the entrepreneurs in this country, the small businesses in this country, the inventors, the scientists and my neighbour with his new cloud based business all need this technology in order to use who they are for their own benefit and for the benefit of this nation.

It is great to talk about submarine cables and it is a really terrific that they are the highest technology and the best quality we can get; that takes it to our shores and connects the businesses that are big enough to afford to be near big cities where they can benefit from the high speed. There are many others in this country who have much more to offer as we move into this new age. It is about time the government opposite made sure that they are supported in those endeavours.

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