Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are so many policy areas that make me incredibly proud to be a Labor member of this parliament. Whether it is the fairness that we put into our health policies or the equity in our education policies, we are a party that are very clear about what our values are, and we build really good policies around them. But there are few policies that make me more proud of the work we on this side of the House have done than the National Broadband Network policy.

We have watched in the last few days and weeks as those on the other side have constantly turned back and looked to their past. We have seen them have these awful fights between themselves, cabinet leaks and so on. But, while all that has been going on, those of us on this side of the House have been looking to the future. What we are concerned about is the massive transformation taking place as a result of the digital revolution.

My friend the member for Gellibrand is sitting in front of me, and one of the fascinating facts that he likes to talk about is that these smartphones we all carry around in our pockets are more powerful computer systems than the computer systems that put two men on the moon. The implications of this revolution for the way we live and work in this country are absolutely profound. In 2013, an Oxford University study showed that about half of all the jobs that exist today will be gone in two decades—because of technological change. In the face this, what we on the Labor side of the House do is think about what this means for the country and what we can do to help the people we represent prepare for this transformation.

We know that the pieces of infrastructure we need to help us build prosperity in the future are going to be different from the ones that helped us in the past. What we need is world-class broadband to underpin future innovation and our future prosperity. So we put forward a visionary, nation-building policy. It was a policy that was so necessary, because the performance of Australia's broadband is really quite terrifying. In the two years that the current Prime Minister was the Minister for Communications, we saw Australia fall further and further back in global rankings. Now, according to the recent Akamai report, we are 44th in the world for broadband speeds. Look at the countries that are whipping us on this. They include countries like Latvia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Taiwan and Russia. We are trying to compete in a global economy and support a high-skill, high-wage, prosperous nation, but we have this problem sitting in front of us.

We had a good policy, a real policy, that was going to solve this problem: fibre to the home for 90 per cent of Australian households. But this Prime Minster who thinks he knows everything—we saw that today in question time; it is a little bit embarrassing, I have to say—brought that hubris into the communications portfolio, and what did we see? What has come out the other end after two years? What we saw was a minister who thought he knew better come in and say that he could deliver a similar product at much lower cost. He told us that the NBN was going to cost $29.5 billion. After two years, because of his mismanagement and because of his lack of understanding of what needed to happen to get the policy implemented, the cost has almost doubled. That is not all: the speed of the rollout is going to be completely different. We were told by this minister that it would be a three-year rollout. Instead it is going to be seven years before my community of Hotham sees the big difference we need to see—and the mix of technologies that is being put forward by the then communications minister, now the Prime Minister, is going to deliver broadband of a much lesser quality. This is broadband of the past, not the broadband of the future that Labor was proposing.

I really feel this in my role as the member for Hotham. Some in the chamber may not realise this, but we have incredible problems with internet connections and internet speeds in my electorate. And I do not represent an electorate that is hundreds of kilometres from a major centre; I am 20 kilometres from the inner city of Melbourne. Yet I am constantly getting complaints from people in my electorate who cannot get connected to broadband. We are sick of it. It is ridiculous that a country like Australia has not solved this problem—and we have not solved it because of the poor performance of the current Prime Minister in his former role as Minister for Communications.

This is not just a problem affecting homes in my community. Highlighting the economic importance of this subject, recently all of the mayors in my electorate—Liberal, Labor and non-aligned—wrote to me. They were desperate to know how we were going to get broadband into our local businesses. They did a study of people in industrial areas near the south-east region of Melbourne. It showed that 85 per cent of businesses in this area are relying on ADSL. This is not a policy for the future; this is a policy of the past. We can do better and the communications minister should know that.

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