Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He's a cheap shots merchant and a man without any credibility. I'll return to the point. Communications are incredibly important to my electorate, like every other electorate in this country, and this government has botched it up. There's no greater symbol of the fizzer we have as Prime Minister than the communications errors he made when he was communications minister, which continue to dog him. They will hang around his neck like a millstone, because that's what they are. They symbolise an incompetent government—a government unable to deliver—and a government that is not delivering the services one would expect in a developed Western nation. I'm very proud that my party took to the last election very strong communications policies that would have fixed a lot of these problems, and I'm confident that we will take policies to the next election that will do the same thing. I continue to fight for my constituents' communications access: access to free-to-air television—which is a right in a developed Western nation—and access to high-speed broadband, which is not just important from an entertainment point of view but also for doing business, for e-commerce, for education and for e-health. These are things that are incredibly important in an advanced economy, which this government is botching and will continue to botch until we chuck them out.

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