Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the member for Boothby for the opportunity to speak on this motion and moving it for discussion in the Federation Chamber, least because it's important to have an honest conversation about the National Broadband Network. Deputy Speaker, I don't want to leave you under any illusion.

I remember when Kevin Rudd first came up with the idea. When he thought the best thing that he could do was inject a giant monopoly into infrastructure investment, actively discouraging private investment and telecommunication companies to invest in a network to make sure that Australians had high-speed internet and to say, 'No, no, the government knows best.' I remember that moment and thinking, 'This isn't going to go so well.' And the reality is that is the legacy of the Labor Party and its National Broadband Network in the years it was in office.

Over years, despite the number of written-down notes on the back of aeroplane napkins—written between abusing flight attendant staff—the reality is that in the six years of the previous Labor government just 51,000 users were connected to the NBN. To put that in perspective, it's a third of the Goldstein electorate. What they thought, with the hubris and the arrogance that sat behind their agenda, was that by dissuading and discouraging private investment they would lead, and somehow be able to build, this perfect utopia. It's a monument to the failure of socialism in one project. They will always stand condemned because Australians have gad worse internet, because of their legacy, ever since, and our job has been to fix their failure. I get angry about this, because when you get the chairman of Telstra coming out and saying, 'If you hadn't have gone down this mad path from the get go, Australians would have had better, cheaper, faster internet.' They actively encouraged the digital divide because of their hubris and their arrogance. Some of us need to call it out.

Since we have been in government we have, at every step, been fixing their mess. Under the Liberal-National coalition government over 60,000 premises are being connected to the NBN every two weeks. You compare that to 51,000 over the entire life of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government and you see the exposed sham of their agenda and why we need to stand up and be clear. But it doesn't change the fact that their active discouragement of private investment, their active dissuasion of getting Australians to invest in the future of internet technology in our country, still has lasting impacts. Every day I talk to constituents who have to deal with the consequences of Labor's bad policy decisions.

We now have more than 10 million homes and businesses connected to the National Broadband Network and we need to continue the rollout. Now we have to make sure that everybody has access to the sorts of technologies that we have. That's why we congratulate the government on its legacy of fixing Labor's failure and fixing the problems that they created which meant that they actively discouraged private investment into the sector. This government, at every point, has shown that prudence and responsibility can still be in vogue.

See this speech in context