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

0.14 megabytes per second It is so slow that it is not worth talking about. In fact, the Parramatta Advertiser quite correctly said that it is faster to phone a friend in the Congo, where the average speed is 1.75 megabytes per second, and have them read the article to you. That is actually true. If you live in Merrylands, it is faster to phone the Congo because the Congo has faster download speeds.

In fact, it is interesting to see who does have faster download speeds than us. I actually printed out the list today because it is so extraordinary. We are currently ranked between 44th and 46th, depending on who you talk to. In fact, we have gone backwards while we have been building the NBN. Our NBN is rubbish and the rest of the world is building good stuff. They are building faster fibre; we are building rubbish. We are going backwards. We are spending $46 billion and we are going backwards. This is absurd.

It is once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this right and we are spending money to go backwards relative to many countries. The 10 on the list that are all better than us, higher on the list, are Qatar, Madagascar, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Thailand, Poland, Slovenia and Ukraine. They are the ones that are just above us on the list.

By the way, business has to upload and health and e-services have to upload. So it is not just download speeds. If you want to find a country that is slower than Australia's average upload speed of 3.89 megabytes per second, there is Senegal, Jamaica, Argentina, Colombia, Fiji, Montenegro, Italy, Croatia, Faroe Islands, Turkey, Serbia and Oman. They are the countries that have slower upload speeds than us. Yet we have a Prime Minister that comes in here and dares to talk about innovation but does not provide the basic infrastructure, and spends $46 billion building something that will not even support basic level innovation. In fact, it will not even support what we already know we are going to do with this technology: work from home, basic movie downloads, e-health. This is a shambles. If there was ever an example of a government that cannot run a raffle, this is it. This is a government that took a great project and turned it into the most massive waste of money and opportunity this country will probably ever see.

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