Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to talk about infrastructure in my electorate of Wakefield and in particular to talk about the government’s National Broadband Network, which is an important project that will help Australia remain competitive in the global economy of the 21st century.

I would first like to commend the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy for his unwavering commitment to implementing this policy. That unwavering commitment is in the face of some opposition out there, particularly in this parliament from the Liberal and National parties, somewhat extraordinarily. The minister recently came down to my electorate and switched on a very important television re-transmission tower which, for the first time in about 25 years, since the founding of Craigmore and Hillbank, now gives a strong enough signal for people to get a clear picture on their TV screens from free-to-air channels. This was one of my most important election promises and one that I was absolutely committed to implementing because I think there is something un-Australian about not being able to watch the cricket or the tennis and not being able to get a clear signal just because of where you live. This is a residential area of Adelaide and it always perplexed me that television stations could get away with not servicing these people. But, as we know, markets do fail on occasion and governments have to step in, so we stepped in with this television re-transmission tower, which has fixed that problem and added greatly to the amenity of people in Craigmore and Hillbank. It has made a lot of people very happy. About 50 or 60 people came out to the opening of the tower and I think half of them were there just to make sure I kept my promise. I have had consistently very good feedback from that area whenever I have done shopping centre stalls or been out in the community. I think people do get a big kick out of seeing politicians deliver on their words. So it is a tick, I suppose, for my performance so far.

Often the residents remind me that the job is not done. They always ask me about broadband, which is also terrible in Craigmore, which is stuck on an old exchange on a pair gain, as were the residents in Burton, where I used to live. I have moved now and I have ADSL, but there are many black spots all over my electorate, particularly in Craigmore and, to a certain extent, Hillbank. They suffer from the same problem: they are stuck on dial-up and they are stuck on wireless and it has a huge effect on people’s lives. A couple of years ago I met a young lady, an American, who had married a South Australian. They met in Iraq, of all places, and love bloomed. She moved to Hillbank, but she had to commute to Sydney every week so that she could do her job as a journalist. Had she had a national broadband network and been able to get high-speed internet services, she would not have had to make that commute to Sydney every week. Obviously, that places a great deal of strain on a relationship, but it also places a great deal of strain on the economy. With us all being aware of our carbon emissions, it is a vivid example of how the National Broadband Network will prevent the necessity to travel as much.

We are in this situation because the previous government had 18 failed broadband policies over 12 years of government, and when they left office Australia’s broadband speed lagged behind those of 26 other OECD nations. That is quite an extraordinary record. It stunned me, to tell you the truth, when they started putting out pamphlets in my electorate saying that they opposed the National Broadband Network. I was absolutely overjoyed. I was so overjoyed I quoted it in my own election material. So I thank Senator Ferguson for that pamphlet promoting Tony Abbott’s commitment to tear up the National Broadband Network. You would have thought that they would give consideration to all the evidence, the amount of angst in the community about this and the obvious concerns of many members of this parliament—not just the Labor Party. You would have thought that the Liberal and National parties would have learnt their lesson. But what did we get straight after the election? Mr Turnbull was back in the harness—

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Wakefield ought to refer to members by their titles.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take your point, Mr Deputy Speaker. The member for Wentworth was back in the harness—and that is a good thing for his party, no doubt—but his marching orders were to destroy this valuable national piece of infrastructure. It is extraordinary that they should be so utterly honest about their commitment to do this. We just have to remember what is at stake here. There is a great deal at stake in terms of the new economy, e-health, e-education, small business opportunities and productivity. At the moment we rank 29th out of 50 countries. We have an average connection speed of 2.6 megabits per second and no Australian city is in the top 100 cities in the world for average internet connection speed. So we have a situation where we have been left with this legacy of inaction, this legacy of failure. We are trying to fix it up and, every chance they get, the member for Wentworth and the Liberal Party decide to obstruct this valuable piece of infrastructure.

We know it is valuable in so many ways. The Centre for International Economics found that it could increase GDP by 1.4 per cent after just five or six years, and that it will deliver speeds for both uploading and downloading, which is a particular feature of a fibre network. We know that it will create some 25,000 jobs just in infrastructure, just in building this great national network. We know that this is the Snowy Mountains scheme of the 21st century. It is of vital national importance.

We have to contrast that great nation-building program with the opposition’s policy, which is delay and inaction. Just like they delayed in government, they now seek to delay us in implementing our policy, a policy that has found favour with the Australian people, a policy that will deliver important economic and social benefits to people in my electorate. People in my electorate are on the front line of this problem in many ways. Adelaide has some of the worst infrastructure. A lot of pair gains were put in suburbs that were expanding in the late eighties and early nineties. We have a lot of country towns in my electorate. Many of them have people commuting on the Northern Expressway, which is a piece of infrastructure that was completed before time and on budget, an infrastructure project in which 14 per cent of workers were either Indigenous or young workers, giving those people a start in civil construction.

What we want to do is to create the same type of infrastructure program with the National Broadband Network, something that will create jobs, build economic growth and deliver vast social benefits to this country. That is something that does not just benefit Labor voters or independent voters; it will benefit coalition voters. So it is just bizarre that they should stand in the way of this important bit of national infrastructure, that the member for Wentworth should be given just one job—that is, to demolish the NBN. It really is, I think, an extraordinary act of economic vandalism. It is an extraordinary act of vandalism to the national interest and I urge opposition members to think carefully about what they are doing. It is not in their interests, ultimately, and it is certainly not in the country’s interests to prevent this National Broadband Network from proceeding.