Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week I visited Tiny Legends childcare centre in the suburb of Brighton with Labor's communications spokesman, Jason Clare. Tiny Legends is one of the very many businesses across Lilley, and right across our country, that are attempting to adapt to and take advantage of opportunities in the digital economy. They are having great difficulty doing that. They have been frustrated by a poor internet service and the failure of the Turnbull government to deliver the NBN by the end of 2016 as they promised before the election.

This is an area that is changing dramatically. Many new families are moving into the area and many new home-based businesses are in the area. But the communications infrastructure is completely inadequate. That is why this area was a prime target for Labor's NBN and most particularly for fibre. The area has a dramatically increasing demand because of young families with their kids, home based businesses and other businesses like Tiny Legends.

Tiny Legends has seen their broadband quality deteriorate over the past several years to the point where their internet ceases to work from 9 am onwards. So they have great difficulty putting in place innovative ideas for their business such as a digital child check-in or updates to the parents during the day so parents can see what is happening with their children at play and in sleep. What they are forced to do at Tiny Legends is to use a hot spot. That is a less reliable mobile hotspot for their internet. That is how bad it is because the infrastructure has not been upgraded as it would have been through Labor's NBN by the end of this year. Of course by using their mobile phones, which are also difficult to use, it is four times as expensive for them. Under Labor, 80 per cent of homes in Lilley would have been connected to the NBN by July last year. Now, under the Liberals, less than half of Lilley has the NBN installed and many suburbs, such as Brighton, will not receive the Liberals' second-rate NBN until at least late 2017.

The rollout of the NBN, under its former minister, Mr Turnbull, has been a shambles. What we are now seeing is a second-rate NBN. We are now seeing the government going back to copper and purchasing copper. We are now seeing in many areas of the country the use of that copper by the NBN, and in many homes it is simply not working. And that fate may well await many in my electorate of Lilley. So we have a second-rate NBN at double the cost and four years behind schedule.

What we are seeing under the Liberals is what we are seeing across so many other areas of public policy. What is going to emerge now—again—is a digital divide, where large parts of the country will not have access to the quality universal service which fibre to the premise would have delivered. All Australians would have had an equal opportunity to access this innovative technology which empowers people in their lives and in their businesses. When it comes to the digital divide or this government's attack on penalty rates, or what it is doing on Medicare or how it is not adopting Gonski, this government does not defend battlers, it creates them. This government sets out to divide in its policies. It does not believe in universal access.

This Prime Minister, like former Prime Minister Abbott, believes in his heart that inequality is good for a country. The government sees it as an economic good that somehow drives competition and productivity. Of course, if you believe that, the logic that flows from that in terms of economics is that the well-to-do and the wealthy do far better and a lot of other people get left behind. And that is what is happening in terms of this digital divide. People across the suburbs with their home based businesses—people in small businesses across my electorate and so many others, including the electorate of Petrie—are being left behind by the decision of this government to give to most people a second-rate service. This will open up the digital divide across the community.

In opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, just like former Prime Minister Abbott, knew that he could not really tell us what the coalition were going to do in government because if the people knew what they were going to do they would not have voted for them. So they covered up their plans for the NBN, they covered up their plans for Medicare, they covered up their plans for Gonski and they covered up their plans for industrial relations because they believe in their hearts that we have a society which should be divided. (Time expired)

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