Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection from the other side. No, after six years nothing had been done in my electorate of Bowman—zero. With an average of two streets connected after six years, you need to pick this up and ask yourself, in the counter-factual, had Labor continued with their plan how many of the complaints you hear today about our NBN would you have heard for Labor's NBN, where only 10,000 dwellings a year were being connected? They might have upped it to 50,000, but the reality is that it's not 300,000. You need to remember that every complaint you have about the coalition's NBN represents a complaint you'd have had with Labor's NBN, where they basically would drip-feed the nation with fibre to the home and virtually no competition in retail provision. That is quite an important statistic. If they haven't studied economics—and that's everyone on the other side, except one guy who went to ANU and did it through the sociology department—what they won't understand is that with competition between 140 providers you are going to get a drop in price and an increase in data availability. And that drop in price is around $40 a month. Those packages you see from Telstra and Optus are $40 a month cheaper than if you had government provided fibre to the home and no competition in the price at which it is provided.

Take my electorate of Bowman: sure, we'd love a faster rollout, but there are only two potential pathways here. There is the technology mix being used by Scandinavia and by most of the developed world, outside of city states like Singapore, Hong Kong or Seoul, where population density is around 17,000 humans per square kilometre and different forms of economics do stack up. But that's not the case in Australian cities, where Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide have around 1,200 to 2,000 residents per square kilometre. There simply are not enough people paying internet bills to justify fibre to the premises. In Brisbane, where there are 1,200 humans per square kilometre, or in my mainland electorate of Redlands, where there are only 700 humans per square kilometre, there is simply a lot of money paid in rod and roping and not enough customers to pay for the service. That's why the simple premise of the coalition's approach is that we will roll out fibre when it is economically justifiable to do so. That lies at the heart of Labor's approach. They were going to roll out fibre, but six to eight years more slowly. They were going to roll out fibre at $20 to $30 billion more than the country had to spend on it. They can go all around the country collecting complaints, but they cannot escape that brutal reality.

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