Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My electorate of Tangney is not poor by any means. Indeed, it includes a couple of the most established and affluent riverfront suburbs in Perth, as well as many more with a demographic that could be said to be solidly middle to upper middle class. My electorate is not remote by any measure, with most of my constituents living only several kilometres from the CBD—a short drive along the freeway which cuts through the middle of my electorate. It also includes the well-respected and very large Murdoch University. Not surprisingly then, the level of demand for internet service in my electorate is extremely high. And given all of the above, it is becoming increasingly obvious that delivery of internet services to the area is woefully inadequate. The federal government has taken pains to outline a grand vision for high-speed data links to almost every home in the country. But promises of what might be, which strike most as mere pipedreams at that, resonate emptily with citizens who are being denied even basic internet service because of complete disinterest demonstrated by the Prime Minister and his communications minister.

Being told of the great possibilities of high-speed links means little to those with no speed. The potential of the information superhighway is superfluous to those who cannot even enter the on-ramp. In the long-established suburb of Booragoon, constituents have told me that they are unable to access any ADSL services, let alone higher speed connections available elsewhere. Their only option, they say, is to pay for wireless services, which, as most of us should know, can be prohibitively expensive. In Canning Vale, a relatively new suburb with a high proportion of young professional families, many residents enjoy below-ground services cables for utilities and even television, which is quite unusual in Perth, but are told that they may only have dial-up internet access because some of the area’s hardware has not been upgraded from the days before development, when it hosted small, semirural properties and not much else.

Similar complaints pour in from around the electorate, so the announcements proudly made by members opposite on the future national broadband network are met with despair by many in my electorate. The $43 billion plan should one day, several years down the track, give access to services most citizens of developed countries already take for granted. The government apparently does not care about this. Why else would it ignore these complaints as it ploughs on with a $43 billion broadband scheme? That money would pay for the equivalent of four Snowy Mountain schemes today. Whatever happened to the new broadband services promised by 2008? Whatever happened to the $20 million spent by this incompetent government on the disastrous National Broadband Network tender process, which ultimately collapsed? This is a government of no substance and of no hope.