Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

TE Lawrence once wrote:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

The trouble with the former Minister Conroy is that he was actually asleep. It was a good idea, no doubt, and with good intention, I have no doubt, but without a plan for implementation it was merely hallucination. To think that a government and a government department and, with respect, the bureaucrats could do a better job than the private sector in building such a massive piece of infrastructure was arrogance personified. The overpromising and the underdelivering of the previous government is something that no doubt somebody will write a book about one-day. It was done on a drinks coaster. More fool you if you believe the numbers that were provided by the previous government. In four years they had no accounting. Labor left us with measures upon which we were based. We are now getting back on with the job and we are delivering an NBN that will be affordable to the people of Australia with the honesty and the accounting that it provides. We are not going to rewrite history.

In my electorate of Lyons, we have a number of communities that already have been connected with fibre to the premise: Triabunna, Midway Point, St Helens and Deloraine. With respect, these are the communities, and it was this technology that provided the most difficulties. When you are digging up backyards and you are having to drill holes through walls, these were the difficulties. With the headline speeds, though, of 100 megabits download and 40 megabits upload, only 10 per cent of people around Australia have taken up these feeds. Eighty-seven per cent of people are choosing speeds of 25 megabits per second or less. Labor talk about gigabytes per second services. Nationally, five people out of a million connections, costing roughly $20,000 a month, have been able to access such services. Basic services with spots to such speeds cost hundreds if not thousands and depend very much on the volume required.

Much of my electorate will be connected very soon—in the first half of 2016—to fibre-to-the-node technology. It is a simpler technology which delivers the same headline speeds of 100 megabits down and 40 megabits up. The communities at Evandale and Dodges Ferry will be connected by the middle of next year, Evandale possibly earlier. Bicheno, Gravelly Beach, Brighton, Gagebrook, Campbelltown, Grindelwald, Lawitta, New Norfolk, Longford, Orford and Westbury will all be connected through fibre-to-the-node technology.

Fixed wireless is of course a very important technology for regional and rural electorates like Lyons. Already in Tasmania 27,810 premises are covered through wireless, with a final figure of 36,000—or roughly 12 per cent—to be connected. In my electorate of Lyons, the percentage is much higher. Headline speeds of 50 megabits down and 20 megabits up are truly comparable with anywhere in the world. Importantly, prices on offer for the packages in these areas are among the cheapest in the world. I think particularly of the communities that are very dependent on tourism, such as those around Coles Bay, that will very soon have connection to the NBN via wireless. There is a great story up at the Great Lake, where Peter and Kaylee Hattinger have access to wireless at the Great Lake Hotel. They speak very highly of the service they have. We were told that the cost was going to be roughly $2½ thousand per connection. On coming to government, however, we discovered the cost to be more like $4,300 per connection.

Satellite will also be an important connection technology in my electorate of Lyons. Labor did not care about regional Australia. They were more interested in getting connections in the areas around central Sydney and central Melbourne—areas that already had excellent ADSL connections. For the first time, regional Australia will be part of this. In Tasmania, with credible accounting and proper budgets, the project is well and truly back on track. We will be the first state completed in the country. We have a regional focus and Lyons will be the beneficiary.

See this speech in context