Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My community will be very disappointed that the government’s recently announced broadband plan will deliver only a second-class service in the electorate I represent. As we know, the Prime Minister’s plan will deliver high-speed fibre networks only to the inner areas of the five major capital cities. So we will see people in the metropolitan area getting high-speed broadband, capable of delivering speeds of up to 50 megabytes per second, and people in regional Australia and in electorates like mine having to struggle in the main with an inferior wireless service, which the government hopes will supply just 12 megabytes per second. It will end up being a two-tier, two-speed system: high speeds for the inner areas of capital cities and lesser speeds—and no-one can dispute it will be lesser speeds when the system is established—in regional areas like mine.

Unlike Labor’s high-speed fibre-to-the-node national broadband network, which does not discriminate between cities and regional areas, wireless broadband, as we know and as our constituents know, suffers from a range of technical problems. My electorate is scheduled—can you believe it?—to receive only one exchange upgrade to very fast ADSL2+ broadband and eight new wireless broadband sites, which will be built at Albion Park, Dapto, Minnamurra, Port Kembla and Warilla. Interestingly enough, the one exchange upgrade—the only one I get—covers only a small part of the existing electorate of Throsby, around Shell Cove, but picks up areas currently in the neighbouring seat of Gilmore including Minnamurra and Kiama Downs, which I will hopefully, if I am re-elected, take over after the election. It will be interesting to see just how many exchange upgrades are provided for the neighbouring seats of Gilmore and Hume—and I will be keeping an eye on that to make sure that decisions about exchange upgrades are not being made on a party political basis.

It is very hard for me and for my constituents to understand why centres of huge population growth and new housing developments around the centres of Horsley and Albion Park are to be denied access to very fast ADSL2 and why the exchanges there will not be upgraded to meet the needs of constituents and businesses. It is the case, as we know, that the performance and reliability of wireless suffers because of distance, bad weather, hilly geography and congestion. The Howard government’s broadband policies are a quick political fix in the lead-up to the election and are not really about delivering first-class services to regional Australia.