Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to raise an issue that most members of my electorate would be quite unaware was growing apace as a problem for them into the future. In fact, when they find out, they will be extraordinarily angry and outraged. It is the collateral damage arising out of the National Broadband Network proposal of the government.

Recently I was watching The 7.30 Reportfor my sins—and noticed that David Bartlett, the Premier of Tasmania, said:

Essentially, the optic fibre gets slung across the electricity wires and then enters the home through the same place that the electricity wires would.

Conor Duffy, the reporter, said:

It’s believed negotiating access to these poles was a key issue in the negotiations with Tasmania’s state-owned power company Aurora … negotiating access will be an issue right across the country …

I suddenly realised that the National Broadband Network is going to be rolled out across the overhead cables of the suburbs of Australia. I am absolutely certain that people in my electorate would have assumed that the National Broadband Network would have been underground. In my electorate, 70 per cent of cables being swung across overhead cables will do enormous damage to the urban environment of what has sometimes been described as the ‘leafy eastern and north-eastern suburbs’ of Adelaide.

Back in 1997, when the Howard government moved to protect the urban environment, we introduced measures which required local and state government approval for the slinging of overhead cables, especially in suburbs like those of the City of Burnside, the City of Norwood Payneham and St Peters, the City of Campbelltown, the City of Tea Tree Gully, the City of Port Adelaide Enfield and even the city of Walkerville, which is a small part of my electorate. This protected streets and trees and the urban environment from being chopped and lopped and disfigured, doing real damage to property values but also creating issues of safety, problems with vandalism and problems with fire which come from overhead cables, especially when there are far too many overhead cables in a particular location.

The government will be hearing a great deal more about my opposition to overhead cables being swung in my electorate, destroying the urban environment. I think the public in Adelaide will be horrified to learn that in New South Wales the Rees government has actually suspended the state and local development requirements for the overhead cables to be swung. If South Australia follows suit, we will be powerless locally to stop the disfigurement of our urban environment, our trees, shrubs et cetera, because of the National Broadband Network.