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

It is a pleasure to be speaking in the Main Committee on the issue of overhead cabling in my electorate. People are starting to find out quite a bit about the National Broadband Network in terms of its lack of a cost-benefit analysis, the potential waste that will be involved, the lack of a business plan and so forth. The Leader of the Opposition raised those issues in question time yesterday, we have been raising them for some time and I think they will become important issues for people. But the immediate concern of people in my electorate, which they are only just beginning to discover, is that the vast majority of cabling for the National Broadband Network will be overhead cabling. It is estimated that 70 per cent of the cabling will be strung from telegraph pole to telegraph pole, potentially through significant trees that line the streets of many of the suburbs in my electorate and many other electorates across Australia.

If voters cast their minds back to the late 1990s—and I notice the member for Mackellar is here, and she would well remember this—one of the great debates that occurred in the government was on the issue of overhead cabling for the purpose of pay television. In electorates like hers and mine it was a visceral issue for the residents of suburbs who prided themselves on their tree lined streets and the value that those tree lined streets gave to their homes. The possibility of that value being substantially reduced by vandalising and hatcheting trees to pieces in their streets for the purpose of installing overhead cables was very much rebelled against and in fact was averted because of the work of people like me, the member for Mackellar and other people who had such seats.

I am very concerned that this government is overriding local development laws under Building the Education Revolution with the requirement to put overhead cables from telegraph pole to telegraph pole in Tasmania for the purpose of the National Broadband Network. People in my electorate of Sturt, in suburbs from Glen Osmond to Highbury, will become very deeply concerned when they discover that the flawed National Broadband Network will not only cost them money in terms of higher interest rates and higher taxes because of the waste and mismanagement of the program but actually impact on the quality of their lives and the value of their homes as trees are chopped up, literally vandalised, and have holes put straight through the middle of them so that overhead cables can be laid for the purpose of the National Broadband Network. (Time expired)