Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

deplores the totally inadequate nature of Australia’s current broadband communications infrastructure;

(2)

denounces the Howard Government’s piecemeal dithering with broadband over the past ten years;

(3)

declares that Australia should be a world leader in broadband communications along with the Netherlands and South Korea, rather than one of the last to take up fast broadband; and

(4)

demands a modern, 21st Century, national broadband communications infrastructure for Australia, as set out in federal Labor’s broadband plan to build a fast network for the whole of Australia.

Paragraphs 1 and 2, which deplore what we currently have and denounce the Howard government’s inability to deal with the issue, go to the very core of our problem. Australia is a complete and utter laughing stock comparatively when you look at broadband take-up and what the government has done to amend the problem. If you look at the OECD rankings, Australia is 17th out of 30 countries surveyed by the OECD to take up 256 kilobits broadband. That is unchanged from last year because this government is simply not committed to providing the infrastructure that Australia needs for the present and the future.

According to the World Economic Forum, Australia ranks 25th in terms of available internet bandwidth; Australia’s network readiness is 15th and falling. A recent World Bank study confirms that Australia’s average ADSL speed of barely one megabit per second is one of the slowest in the world behind countries like Britain with 13 megabits per second, France with 8.4 megabits per second, Germany with 6.85 megabits per second and Canada with 6.8 megabits per second.

In the modern age, speed is everything. Currently every member of this parliament has the capacity to access the internet by broadband wherever they are in Australia. What were they allowed to have? Initially it was 28 kilobits per second. What were they allowed to have up until very recently? The absolute minimum if you are talking real broadband is 256 kilobits per second; it has just been doubled to 512 kilobits per second. What is the reality for most of Australia? People are at 256 kilobits per second or lower. It is possible that you could have a minimum of 1.5 megabits per second or faster—over 10 megabits per second—using the current infrastructure of copper and ADSL2 and if much faster units were put into Telstra’s exchanges. This should be across the board if the government provided all of the infrastructure, but they have not.

Telstra—Australia’s biggest company—has done absolutely nothing to enter the fast broadband area. Instead it is regional Australia and companies like iiNet and iPrimus that have taken advantage of future speed and provided that to people for the same amount of money that it costs them for much slower services. Labor has seen what the situation is, looked at the past 10 years of government dithering and put forward a broadband plan for now and the future. Upon coming to government in 2007, Kim Beazley has indicated that by the time our first term is completed in 2010 we will provide a fast broadband service based on fibre to the node and DSLAMs which give ADSL2+ access so that the minimum access speed that 98 per cent of Australians should enjoy is six megabits per second, with most people enjoying much more.

What does that allow? It allows video on demand. It allows people, wherever they are in Australia, to run their businesses with fast internet access. It allows a revolutionising of Australia’s broadband access and the sorts of things you can do with the internet. It allows Australia to catch up to South Korea, which already has an immense infrastructure provided by its government. It allows us to catch up to the Netherlands, which has gone from fibre to the node completely to fibre to the home. Fast internet access through fast broadband is absolutely essential for a modern, 21st century government infrastructure. We deserve it and Labor will give it.

Alex Somlyay (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I reject the opposition’s claim that Australia is not a world leader in broadband communications. They are running a disingenuous line by saying that Australia should have broadband penetration rates comparable to those of geographically small countries—some mentioned those in Europe and others like Japan and Korea. It is time for Labor to come clean and admit that their policy will cost taxpayers billions of dollars, perhaps coming close to the $40 billion that the South Korean government spent rolling out its fibre.

Australians understand the limitations of distance and the limitations of innovations. They are all part and parcel of living in the most sparsely populated country on the planet. What we have to do is use a mixture of technologies—not just fibre, which would be inordinately expensive. We need to look at other technologies.

Despite our geographic challenges, the take-up of broadband services in Australia has now reached almost four million connections—the equivalent of about 80 per cent of Australian households and small businesses. As at 30 June this year, broadband take-up had increased by 1.4 million connections or 67 per cent from June 2005. That is according to the latest ACCC Snapshot of Broadband Deployment. Australia was also in the top five OECD countries for per capita broadband subscriber growth. If you want to rate us with the OECD, you want to look at where we stand in the equation and how fast we are rolling things out. We can expect continued growth in broadband take-up thanks to the government’s serious investment in rolling out broadband around this nation.

Last year the coalition announced $3.1 billion in funding for telecommunications projects, including $878 million for Broadband Connect. This program, which has already provided an extra one million broadband connections to both homes and businesses in Australia, was to be a new launching pad. We have delivered $2 billion of that to the communications fund to provide an income stream to fund future upgrades of rural telecommunications infrastructure. That could also have an impact on broadband further down the track. The government also recently announced a second-stage program which will see $600 million spent on larger-scale infrastructure projects to deliver competitive wholesale prices in regional areas into the future.

Let us get one thing straight: the Labor Party do not care about getting more broadband into the bush. In fact, Labor described the government’s $3.1 billion Connect Australia package as ‘one of the National Party’s slush funds’. Labor announced in May that, if they were elected to government, they would shut down Connect Australia—note that: they would shut down Connect Australia—including Broadband Connect and the $2 billion in the rural communications fund. Labor plan to use this money to subsidise broadband infrastructure in highly commercial and competitive metropolitan markets like Sydney—areas that the industry itself is prepared to invest in.

The opposition cannot even decide what broadband is. First, the opposition communications spokesman, Senator Conroy, called for broadband of 10 megabits per second and faster, calling anything less ‘fraudband’. Then Kim Beazley came out with his plan for broadband of six megabits per second. It is no wonder that Senator Conroy quickly revised the fraudband definition. He then started talking about 100 megabits per second—a speed which at this point is enjoyed by almost no-one in the world.

The coalition see broadband as a key component of national infrastructure and, as such, one in as much need of national policy oversight as roads, railways, ports and airports. We will need to ensure that services will be provided for into the future and that, where the market does not provide new technology, we have a $2 billion mechanism to provide new technology across rural and regional Australia. The National Farmers Federation has welcomed this new package, saying:

... this $600 million component has the capacity to significantly improve the services, and enhance the availability, of efficient and timely broadband outcomes for rural Australia ...

(Time expired)

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remind the honourable member for Hinkler that he should refer to members by their title or their seat.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Given that I have two minutes, I will now enter the debate, make some comments with respect to this motion and respond to some of the comments made by the member for Hinkler. This motion is a very important motion. I am glad that the member for Blaxland placed it on the Notice Paper.

It is very important that, when we talk about broadband, we define our terms. Of course, what we have to define as much as anything else is the speed at which broadband access is delivered. I think it is pertinent in this debate, when we refer to broadband access, to be mindful of the vast gap between the slowest and fastest fixed broadband speeds. By way of example, in South Korea the majority of the population already has access to speeds of about 24 megabits. By contrast, Australia has about 3½ million households with access to broadband, but 80 per cent of them are at low speeds of less than 512 kilobits a second. In other words, we are far behind South Korea. Only five per cent of the households of our population have access to 24 megabits.

It is that issue of speed as well as access that has to enter the debate, and the government has to become serious about this particular matter. The Leader of the Opposition was quite right when he said that Australia is left ‘trundling along on an IT goat track when the rest of the world is on an information superhighway’. In any comparison of the OECD nations, Australia is clearly behind the majority of them. It is about time the government acted. (Time expired)

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 1.45 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 34. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting and the member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.