Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer her to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ figures that show only 43 per cent of households on incomes of $40,000 a year or less have access to the internet at home. Given that lack of income, not lack of access, is the biggest barrier to internet availability, why is the government building a $43 billion national broadband network monopoly that will, as the McKinsey study demonstrates, raise prices and make the internet more expensive and less affordable?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wentworth for his question and I welcome very much his interest in equity in Australian society. It surprised me a little bit, but I very much welcome his interest in equity in Australian society. If he has such an interest in equity in Australian society and if he wants to pursue that interest I look forward to his support for the government’s policies and plans, which of course are about fairness and opportunity and making sure we do not leave any Australian behind, and certainly not any Australian child. But now, through the prism of his new-found interest in equity, the member for Wentworth is right. Of course ABS and other statistics show that there is a differential use of broadband between income classes. I do not need that explained to me. I can walk the streets of my electorate to see that very visibly on display. And what is that about? Well, it is about education levels. It is about people who missed out on opportunities and great quality schooling early in life. It is about people who missed out on the transformative power of early childhood education. It is about people who came out of school education and often did not get the first step into the workforce—they did not get that apprenticeship, they did not get that start in life. It is about people who have been dependent on welfare over the long term—people whose skills and self-esteem have corroded as a result. Consequently, these people do not have in many ways the skill set they need to manage our ever-changing world. Of the things we are doing as a government, apart from our transformative agenda in early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training and university education, is committing to a transformation in welfare, in participation and in giving people the skills they need to intersect with the world that that live in and the skills they need for a job.

Questions of price do matter to people on fixed incomes, which is why it is a national disgrace that our broadband is so expensive by OECD standards. From the simple principles of economics and market design that this side of the House understands, to reduce price and increase innovation you need to increase competition. That is why we will provide the National Broadband Network—a wholesale network on which there will be competition and innovation in products at the retail end to drive new service offerings. The price points will obviously vary depending on the service offering that people want, but, because of the competition, we will see better price points at which people can get their broadband.

This is the vision of the future that the National Broadband Network promises for this country. In the meantime, the member for Wentworth is stuck with his CANCo plan, announced to the Sydney Morning Herald. He is so unpersuasive that he has not persuaded his frontbench colleagues of the plan. CANCo has turned into Can’t Co, which has turned into Never-Will-Do Co. When it comes to understanding the needs of the modern society in Australia for national broadband, the opposition just gets further and further behind.