Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll come straight back to the NBN. Let's look at the NBN and the Prime Minister talking about how great the NBN is. Well, it's not great for my community. Prices have gone up by 14 per cent since October last year, and the Prime Minister doesn't want to impact on the operations of the NBN.

Let's have a look at the performance of the NBN satellite. What are the consumers telling us about the NBN satellite? About 85,000 people have taken up the NBN through satellite. What are the other options? What are they saying? How do consumers react? Starlink is another satellite option. How many people in Australia have taken up Starlink? Around 270,000 Australians have chosen to take up Starlink. People are speaking with their money and with their feet. If you're the minister, or the Prime Minister, and you look at those results, it pretty much tells you there's an issue there. But they're not looking to make operational changes; they're just looking to have a stump speech and a bit of political spin.

Then we get the Prime Minister passionately defending the NBN and its public ownership, saying that it needs to stay public. I don't think he quite understood what he was doing, because in the same speech he then spoke about nuclear energy. The Prime Minister has stood at that dispatch box in question time, time after time, criticising the opposition because we want to invest in the energy system—another essential service. The Prime Minister talked about how important the NBN is as an essential service, and I agree with him on that. He says the NBN needs to be publicly owned, as an essential service, but we can't have publicly owned energy—we can't have an energy system that is reliable. Why not? The complete lack of logic in the Prime Minister's own words should concern every Australian. Supposedly it is vital that we have public ownership of the NBN because it's an essential service—I agree with that—but it's not vital that we have a strong, reliable electricity network underpinned by the only technology that is zero emission, provides reliable baseload power and is backed by many people, including the former Chief Scientist Alan Finkel. What that shows is that this is all about ideology. It's not actually about a fundamental belief in anything.

This is the challenge with this Prime Minister and this government. They don't stand for anything. They don't believe in anything. They're prepared to spin their performance. They're prepared to say what they need to say, trying to ride both sides of the fence. We saw it just then. We've seen a PM under pressure who is looking to distract. We've got a minister who is rushing through a bill that has no change to the operation of the NBN.

Yet, for months and months, we have been waiting for a response on gambling reform, which sits in the minister's portfolio. Last year, the opposition leader, in his budget in-reply speech, committed to banning gambling ads during sporting events and an hour before and after. That legislation could have been through this House already and people could have been able to watch sport with their families without having to see gambling ads if the minister and the Prime Minister had wanted to act. At that time, they said that they couldn't act because they needed to finish the Murphy report and they wanted to see that. We are now months and months and months from a response on that.

So it's this juxtaposition that we have, of a minister and a government that are suddenly prepared to rush through legislation that is symbolic—legislation that makes no changes at all, doesn't improve the operations of the NBN, doesn't bring prices down for the community and doesn't improve reliability for my community and for regional communities. It does none of that. But we've got to rush it through because it's symbolic.

In many ways, this bill sums up everything that is wrong with this government. It sums up the political spin of a government that is making it worse for the Australian people. They're not making a tangible difference. Two and a half years in, there's not one Australian who's feeling better today than they were 2½ years ago.

The Prime Minister promised he had solutions to the cost of living challenges that the Australian people faced; he promised that in May 2022. He hasn't delivered on that, because there's not an Australian that's feeling better. The Prime Minister promised energy bills would be reduced by $275, and they've gone up significantly in those 2½ years.

The reason that this bill is symbolic of that is: the reality is that you can't spin your way out of the challenges the Australian people face. You can't bring in a bill that makes no difference and think that the lives of the Australian people are going to be improved. I can understand—I've got a little bit of empathy for the Prime Minister, in the sense that he's been in this House since 1996. He's spent his whole life here. This is what he knows; this is what he understands. The Treasurer brags about being involved in delivering 18 budgets, either as a Treasurer, a staffer or an MP. So I'm sure they genuinely think that a bill like this makes a difference; I'm sure they do. But it doesn't.

Unless you are delivering on the root causes of what the Australian people face, you are not going to solve the challenges that we face. We've seen it with energy. We've seen it with interest rates. We've seen it with housing. We're now seeing it with the NBN.

This bill will make no difference for the Australian people. It will not improve performance at all. Yet the Prime Minister of this country deemed it so important to speak on a bill that makes no tangible difference to the Australian people that he came down from his office and sat here and he mandated that every member of his team turn up and sit in the back so he gets a good camera shot. They needed the great optics of the Prime Minister standing at the dispatch box with everyone behind him instead of talking to constituents and doing the work they were doing. They were here to nod heads for the Prime Minister on a bill that, in the minister's own words, will not change the operations of the NBN. It will not improve the services for the residents of Casey. It will not improve services for the Dandenongs. It will not help those businesses that lost so much money in Kalorama. This is the frustration that we feel. It's all the spin. We can get everyone together for the spin. Two and a half weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet with what we refer to as the captains on the hill. Up at Kalorama, there was the Kalorama Mount Dandenong CFA and the Sassafras-Ferny Creek CFA. Olinda CFA were represented as well. We spoke to the Kallista CFA about the communications challenges that they face. They haven't been resolved 2½ years later. They need to be resolved.

Let's understand, when we talk about this, how important this is. In the June storms of 2021, for Sarah, who is involved at the Sassafras-Ferny Creek CFA, the only way to communicate with other CFA volunteers putting their lives on the line was through text message. But she had to leave her phone on her desk at the station and try to text. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. It's the middle of the night, and we are asking residents of our community to volunteer their time to keep us safe. They do that willingly, but we need to give them the communications that they need and deserve for our emergency services. That is what they need.

Two and a half years into the Albanese Labor government, we don't get a solution to those challenges, but we get a bill that makes no difference and does not improve the communications for the CFAs or residents in my community. We get a bill that is a stunt. It is a bill to allow the Prime Minister to distract from his character failings yesterday. That's what it's about. Ultimately, this bill is so symbolic of the Albanese Labor government. It's all about spin and optics; it's not about delivering for the Australian people. You can spin for a little while, but, after 2½ years, the Australian people know they've been abandoned.

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