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

Of all the things that the Abbott-Turnbull government has done over the last 2½ years, it is the trashing of the NBN that completely boggles my mind. Every time I think about it I am just stunned by the stupidity and the incompetence that we have seen by the current Prime Minister in his previous role as the Minister of Communications and since he became Prime Minister. In making that statement I include walking away from action on climate change, so it is a big statement to make. The trashing of the NBN is one of the most stupid things I have seen any government do. I sit here on this side of the House and I go home to my electorate. I see businesses that cannot work from home, kids that cannot download work for homework and schools where only one kid can be online at a time. I am just astonished at the stupidity.

I hear this Prime Minister talking day after day about our houses being our biggest asset. If you are a bit older and you have paid for your house and you are heading towards retirement, if you are same generation as the Prime Minister and me, then maybe that is true. But if you are younger, if you are starting life or you are in your 20s or your 30s, your biggest economic asset is your capacity to earn. That allows you to maybe get a house one day, and it allows you to pay it off, but your earning capacity is actually your biggest asset when you are young.

We have a government that slashes education spending. We have a government that destroys the TAFE system. We have a government that makes degrees unaffordable. We have a government that rips up the very infrastructure that we as a nation need in order to earn an income. We are being seriously left behind by our neighbours and by the rest of the world, and we have been for over a decade. We have been getting further and further behind and our internet speeds have been getting worse and worse relative to those around us who had the foresight to do something about it before we did.

When Labor came to government in 2007 we decided to change that. We started embarking on an infrastructure project that would put this nation where it needed to be 50 to 70 years into the future. We started building the infrastructure that we needed for the future—not the infrastructure that we needed for a decade ago, not the infrastructure that we need to download videos and film, but the technology we need to work in remote locations, to work through the internet rather than the same office, to conduct e-health in regional centres and for people to phone in their results. We do not even know what the NBN will be used for in the future, just as we did not know what telephone lines would be used for when we connected them right across the country nearly a century ago.

This decision by this government is as illogical as the one that was made when we built the rail lines. For those of you here who remember what they learnt in primary school, there were several gauges. There was the Queensland gauge. If I remember correctly, it was three foot six—the member for Chifley might know—

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