Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion put by the member for Casey, a very important motion, and I acknowledge the member for Casey's experience in the technology sector, which is experience that will be very valuable during his time in parliament. This is a very important topic. The tech sector is absolutely critical. The tech sector is the seventh-largest employer in the Australian economy, employing one in 16 working Australians. That's nearly 860,000 Australian people working in the tech sector. As the tech council has said before, there are now more software and application programmers in Australia than there are plumbers, hairdressers or secondary school teachers. The tech sector has come of age, and the government's role in supporting the tech sector is very important.

The tech sector doesn't just create opportunities for government; it creates opportunities right across the economy. In my business, we used technology as a critical ingredient in our success and efficiency. Technology improved our hiring, our invoicing, our accounting, our human resources and our marketing. New digital tools did help us engage with government, improving our efficiency, saving us time and saving us money.

The tech sector will continue to grow into the future, and the government's role in supporting the tech sector's growth is absolutely critical. But, unfortunately, we have had a wasted decade in the tech sector, and that is the great irony of this motion. Today, after 10 years of coalition government, Australia ranks 36 out of 38 nations in the OECD for our ICT trade balance. When the Productivity Commission looked at Australia's digital performance this year, they released an interim report with the following observation:

… while we do well compared to other developed economies on foundational aspects of technology and data use (such as internet connections and data volumes), we are falling behind on some more advanced indicators.

The Productivity Commission goes on to say:

Australia's internet speeds are relatively low and business use of data-driven technologies, such as AI and analytics, trails uptake in other countries.

As a report card on Australia's digital economy and the performance of the coalition government over the last 10 years, the Productivity Commission report makes damning reading. It points out that Australia is 26th in the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence, it points out that 26 per cent of Australian businesses have identified a digital skills gap, and it points out the weak levels of cybersecurity that Australia was left with after 10 years of coalition government.

Of course, the most egregious act of the previous government was their performance on the NBN. And we had the member for Bradfield in the chamber just a moment ago giving us chapter and verse on the performance of his government in delivering digital technologies, but he slightly omitted to reference his own record on the NBN. This was a minister for communications who took a fibre network that was going to deliver a futureproof solution for the Australian economy and changed it to that world-beating future focused technology of copper.

The reason they were going to do that—the reason they took a network that was going to be futureproof, low-cost fibre to all Australians and replaced it with copper—was that they said it was going to be much cheaper. They announced it was going to cost $29 billion. Unfortunately they then had to announce that it wasn't going to cost $29 billion; it was going to cost $41 billion. Then they had to announce it was going to cost $49 billion, and then, finally, they had to admit it was going to cost $58 billion. That's twice as much as they originally planned, to build an inferior NBN network in this country.

For all of their protestations about the importance of the digital economy and the importance of government leading in the digital sphere, they delivered a second-rate NBN to Australia—to all of Australia's industries and to all of Australia's consumers. In my electorate of Parramatta, businesses are still suffering from the low quality of the NBN created by the previous government. It was high cost, low quality and a tragedy for Australia's digital sector. The truth is that, after 10 years of Liberal government, despite there being many great technology businesses in Australia, those businesses have succeeded despite, not because of, the Liberal government. Australia's progress in the digital economy has been held back by poor leadership, poor decisions in the delivery of the NBN and poor decisions across the digital economy.

Let's remember that this was the government that delivered us the census fail. They couldn't even ask Australians where they lived, let alone give them leadership on the digital economy.

See this speech in context