Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Access Regime and NBN Companies) Bill 2015 is before the chamber and I want to very quickly talk about the National Broadband Network. I will not use all my allotted time. I want to reflect on the role of public investment and the role of private investment. Ultimately, I am a strong believer that technology is overtaking us and wireless will be the way that everyone wants to go.

Mr Husic interjecting—

They might laugh at me, but if you look at national broadband networks that have been built around the world, people are accessing their technology through wireless. They simply are not accessing their technology through fibre as the long-term program. What I can access on this iPad and this iPhone here is really critical. I cannot help but think that when we compare NBNs in different parts of the world to Australia's, most of the countries that have superior national broadband networks have not been built by their governments; they have been built by private investment. There is nothing like private investment to get things done.

What we saw when the NBN was first announced was that all private investment stopped. In fact, Horsham, the township I represent, had been promised the NBN but it was not delivered in the time frame—and still has not been delivered. Services have been lacking there because Telstra stopped putting in exchange ports for ADSL and stopped putting in fibre. The area that was never flagged was Mildura and that is where private investment came in and built a fibre network. They actually have reasonably good fibre in the main investment hub.

The irony of it is that the way of the future, whether we like it or not, should be some fibre to businesses in our main business centres, but otherwise it should be wireless. People are choosing to use wireless. I put the alternate view that no-one has ever talked about: what would Australia look like if a commitment of $37 billion had been made to subsidise mobile and wireless technology right across Australia? You would find people in my electorate being able to use their phones to take scans of different things in their vineyards, for example. Wireless is the way that people are heading.

I think that in the future the technology we are building will not be seen as First World; it will be seen as yesterday's technology. By the time it is built—and, admittedly, it is taking time and I hear lots of banter and candid contributions from both sides of the chamber—we will reflect on it and say that if we had spent the same money on wireless, we would have something that would take us into the future rather than what we eventually might have in the years to come.

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