Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk about one of the most frustrating issues which probably happens not just in my electorate of Oxley but right across the country. There are many issues that affect ordinary people but I have to say that the provision of decent broadband services is shaping up to be one of those key election issues. It is something which I know distresses a lot of people. To put it really plainly, it frustrates you to absolute tears when you try to get a connection for the first time, you have a connection and you try to improve the speed, you try to go from a dial-up service to broadband or you realise that the cost is just too high and you are left with few options.

The reality is that in Australia today over 100,000 people a year who have applied for broadband have been turned down because Australia has a second-class telecommunications infrastructure. The government has known about this second-class infrastructure for quite some time but refuses even to admit that the problem exists at all. I can assure the government here tonight without any question or doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are demanding something better than what they have today. I was surprised by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Helen Coonan, who recently said:

... no one is complaining about the speed of broadband in metropolitan areas ...

It is almost a quirky, bizarre quote for a minister for communications to say, ‘no one is complaining’. Clever or tricky, maybe, but perhaps she has not been speaking to anybody, because you do not have to go far for people to complain to you continually about the state of broadband in their local area. In fact, Australia’s ranking in the world is not very good. We are ranked 25th in the world in our broadband speeds. I will not go into the detail of which countries are in front of us but there are a whole heap of less developed and less fortunate countries with fewer mineral resources than we have coming into government coffers within those countries which are ahead of us.

Australia has also fallen behind the rest of the world in broadband usage. We are ranked only 17th in the world. This is the 21st century; broadband connection is almost a given part of life. It is not a lifestyle choice or issue any longer; it is about quality of life, delivery of services, being able to do business and providing better healthcare services. It is about people being connected to the rest of the world. It is about older people in their homes having that window outside when they often might not have the mobility. It is about finding new friends and new ideas. It is this whole big world that is out there that connects everyone to everybody else. But if you do not have the speed, if you still have dial-up, if you do not have the infrastructure in your local area, you simply miss out. That is the stark reality.

In my electorate of Oxley, we have the fastest-growing region in Australia: the western corridor in south-east Queensland is a fantastic growth area but it is not being matched by the provision of telecommunications infrastructure, particularly broadband services in new and old areas alike—for example, Forest Lake, where they are still struggling with broadband black spots; Springfield, which suffers particularly with broadband provision, and older suburbs such as Sinnamon Park, in new areas in that locality. It is just incredible that these areas are not fully serviced and some areas are not serviced all. People are not really given the choices or options, they are just told that it is bad luck and that they are going to have to go to some sort of a satellite dish system or basically it is just too costly. In one of the newer estates in my electorate, Windermere Estate, houses are even sharing phone lines; they are being pushed onto dial-up services and left with very poor choices.

Labor, on the other hand, are committed to developing a national fibre-to-the-node broadband network in Australia, something we will deliver for all Australians. Government can do this; government can do it in partnership with private enterprise and with industry. Labor will also make available $4.7 billion to ensure that the network reaches as many Australians as possible. I think that is a good investment in Australia’s future and it is a good investment in ordinary people. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure investment will deliver a minimum 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australian homes and in a lot of areas it will be much faster. There will be huge leaps forward from where we are today. This is something that people not only need but deserve. This is something our economy needs. This is something that will deliver for Australia way into the future. It is something that this government ought to realise and they should stop saying that people are not complaining. The reality is that people are complaining and they need a government that listens to them.