Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

We brought forward cheaper childcare measures, opposed by those opposite. This legislation is also about the cost of living, because it's about making sure that the National Broadband Network can stay in public hands. It will not be a for-profit provider, which would have, by definition, an obligation to its shareholders—not the Australian people but its shareholders, people who buy shares on the stock market—and therefore would be obligated to maximise profits. This would mean that people in regional and in less densely populated areas of Australia, in particular, would suffer—just as we had to deal with the consequences of the privatisation of Telstra. One of the reasons why we put the National Broadband Network in public hands is that we didn't have a communications provider in the public sector to be able to roll out high-speed broadband for Australians, regardless of where they live.

The National Broadband Network is a vital national asset. It delivers an essential public service. It was built by Australians for Australians. It belongs to every Australian citizen, and it belongs in public hands. That's what this legislation is about. It's about safeguarding the future of the NBN, making sure it cannot be privatised and can't be hollowed out or sold off to overseas interests. This legislation is making sure that every Australian—whether they live in the city, in the regions or in the outer suburbs—can count on the affordable, reliable and fast internet that they need and deserve, publicly owned and affordable for all.

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam once said that his definition of equality was every child in Australia having a quiet room in which to study and a desk with a lamp to read by. That was in the 1970s. In 2024, every Australian child needs to be sitting at their desk with access to the NBN. That's true for school, for TAFE and for university—and every household needs it too. The NBN makes telehealth possible. It makes working from home possible as well. I remember being in the electorate of the member for Richmond, where telehealth services were being delivered, making an enormous difference—something that was written off by the coalition, who argued that it was all about watching videos. It's about delivery of services—health and education services—to wherever people live. It connects us with loved ones, interstate and overseas. It brings together communities of faith. It enables Australians to launch a startup or take their small business idea to a national market. It's what farmers, growers and producers use to monitor weather, soil, feed and water. It helps secure our supply chains, transport, freight and logistics. It supports our national security infrastructure, our banking system and our energy grid.

In every facet of our dynamic, outward-looking economy, in every element of our modern society, the NBN is fundamental to the way that we work, learn, trade and communicate. It's critical to our economic growth as well. A faster, better NBN will contribute $400 billion to GDP by 2030, and that's why our government has invested $2.4 billion to bring full-fibre NBN to an additional 1.5 million homes, including 660,000 in rural and regional centres. We're bringing free wi-fi to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the continent. We're helping 30,000 families with children in school with a free internet connection. I visited one of those schools in the minister's electorate, and it's making such an enormous difference to those children in Western Sydney, who would be without were it not for the commitment that the government has made. From next year, broadband speed will be up to five times faster at no extra cost, and today we are acting to safeguard the NBN for the future.

Since 2011, if a government wanted to sell the NBN, there were four steps they would have to take. In 2020 the Liberals took the first step: they declared the NBN was complete. 'Job done,' they said. Never mind the millions of households that were stuck without fibre or decent service, they wanted to get step 1 done. Then in 2022 they tried to jack up wholesale prices for high-speed broadband so every Australian would have to pay more. It's all about fattening the pig for market day and very similar to what occurred with Telstra under the former government. The ACCC rejected that attempt, but we know that this risk remains because there has never been a public service or a public asset that the coalition didn't want to flog off. It's in their DNA.

When the Leader of the Opposition is looking around for the billions that he needs in the lead-up to PEFO and beyond of how he will fund these nuclear reactors, the most expensive form of energy, he will look at the $315 billion of expenditure that they say is waste. But cuts to the pension, cuts to Medicare, cuts to wages and the sacking of public servants won't be enough to cover all the costs, and he will look towards selling the NBN. He will look at selling a service that virtually every Australian uses to build nuclear reactors that will provide less than four per cent of our energy. And the Liberal Party won't care that there are no Australian buyers. They'd be happy to sell off this national asset and sell out the national interest in a heartbeat. For those opposite it's always the same: let the market rip, and, if people are disadvantaged and miss out, so be it. Remember that their model was that those who could afford the best speeds could get the best speeds because everyone else just wanted to watch videos faster.

With this, we will make sure that people, particularly in regional and rural Australia, are looked after because the advances that are made in health, agriculture, small business, education and emergency communications are too important to be put at risk. Our government is fixing mobile blackspots in the bush that were left by those opposite. A privatised NBN would create internet black holes. In 2008 I was proud to introduce the legislation into this House that created the National Broadband Network. I was proud, as the then infrastructure minister, to do important work along with the then minister for communications Stephen Conroy. We couldn't know that a once-in-a-century pandemic would make remote work and remote learning a necessity for millions overnight, which it did. We didn't know at that time that machine learning, cloud computing and AI would drive exponential demand for faster internet speeds. But we did know that high-speed broadband would be critical for a stronger economy and that affordable broadband would be crucial for a fairer society.

Remember this: those opposite opposed at every level the creation of the National Broadband Network. They regarded it as waste and unnecessary. They regarded it as some obscure technology thing out there that was about watching videos. Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister, is these days known as 50 per cent of the Leader of the Opposition's brains trust, along with his former chief of staff. This is what he had to say in 2013:

… do we really want to invest $50 billion of hard-earned taxpayers' money in what is essentially a video entertainment system?

That was the approach of those opposite. They pledged to rip up Labor's fibre broadband network, which they did. They said the maximum internet speed a household would ever need would be 25 megabits per second. Next year, households across Australia will have access to broadband with speeds up to 80 times faster than that. That's how quickly technology overtakes you when you're stuck in the past and afraid of the future. That's how foolish and frightened the Liberals always look when they try and drag the rest of Australia back to the past, just to keep them company.

The Liberals wasted a decade turning their back on a first-rate fibre network that was already being rolled out. Instead, they bought 60,000 kilometres of copper—enough to wrap around the entire planet 1½ times—to build a slow, third-rate network that was out of date before it was operational. They said it'd cost $29.5 billion, then $41 billion, then $49 billion, then $51 billion and then $58 billion. They derailed progress to impose the wrong technology, which was out of date and redundant before it was built, and signed the country up for something that took longer to build, delivered a less reliable and more expensive service and inflicted massive cost blowouts in construction. If this sounds familiar, imagine trusting this mob to build nuclear reactors. They couldn't build car parks next to train stations for commuters, but they would have you believe that the mob that thought copper was better than fibre in this century could be trusted to build nuclear reactors.

Our government is committed to an NBN that provides fast broadband that every Australian can afford. That means an NBN that every Australian owns. This legislation is our promise and our guarantee to all Australians. Under Labor, the NBN will be affordable, reliable, fast and safe in public hands. I commend the bill to the House.

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