Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to speak about a letter to the editor in The Maitland Mercury this morning from the member for Hunter about the NBN rollout. I would like to raise two quotes by the member for Hunter. The first is from 1 March 2011 in this House, where he said: 'We in the Hunter can see the enormous opportunities that will flow from the rollout of the NBN. We intend to be up there in front grabbing these opportunities earlier rather than later.' The second is from 22 June 2012, when he said, 'the rollout of the NBN—which in Maitland is imminent—'. Yet under Labor it took a full three years from July 2010 to June 2013, for the NBN to cover 100,000 premises nationally under the Labor plan. Under the coalition, the fibre to the node in Newcastle and the Central Coast reached this milestone in just a few months. The Labor Party failed. It was their plan, and had they not have stopped the OPEL rollout—which would have been completed in 2009—everyone would have had high-speed wireless. What we have seen from the Labor Party is massive cost blow-outs—and now Jason Clare wants to go back to fibre to the premises, and we will see a blow-out of between $74 and $84 billion.

We are rolling the NBN out. Areas through Port Stephens, Maitland, and the Hunter have already got it—in October 2015—and the majority of the rollout will occur by the end of the fourth quarter of 2016. We will see people being able to access high-speed internet. I would also like to raise quotes from the former member for Newcastle, who then represented Thornton, who carried on up hill and down dale, with numerous quotes about how Thornton was critically important—and because they were on pair gain wiring systems, they could not get ADSL—and how they needed the NBN. But nothing occurred while Labor were in government for six years—nothing. This coalition has come to government, we have picked up the issue and we are addressing it. It is being rolled out now. In fact, large areas of Maitland and large areas of Port Stephens now have access to high-speed broadband. Is it good enough? No, it is not. We need to do more. We need to be able to provide high-speed internet for each and every Australian, and we are determined to do that through a mix of technologies. Those technologies will include satellite, wireless and fibre to the node.

It is critically important that people have access to high-speed internet. So I do not want to see any more false rhetoric from the member for Hunter, who raised the NBN only fleetingly on a number of occasions in this House. There has been no serious commitment by the member for Hunter, or indeed by the member for Newcastle, to do anything to address the NBN rollout in their areas. I accept the challenge, and I will deliver the NBN to people throughout the region.

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