Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about the benefits of the NBN nationally and locally, particularly in my area. That is one of the great things about the NBN: it is for all of us and it will benefit all Australians—households, businesses, health and a whole range of other areas.

In June this year a local survey was done in my area, the Northern Rivers, which showed that 98 per cent of Northern Rivers’ companies believed that high-speed broadband internet access is important for their business. The survey was done by the NSW Business Chamber. Of the 50 businesses surveyed, 88 per cent said broadband was of great importance, while 10 per cent said it was of some importance and two per cent said it was of no importance. That is reflected in all the surveys that have been done, particularly in the business sector.

One of the things that I was able to do was champion early NBN rollout on the North Coast and, working with the local university, Southern Cross University, and particularly with the then Professor of Information Technology and Information Systems, Professor Peter Croll, put forward a submission from our area. It went beyond my seat of Page; it covered the whole North Coast and out to the tablelands area. We said we were NBN ready, and we were. One of the sites that was early tested on mainland Australia was in New England, in the Armadale area. When the second-release sites were announced in mainland Australia, it was very pleasing to see—if my memory serves me correctly, and I would not get this one wrong—that a lot of them were in regional areas. NBN is something that is of great benefit to the regions.

I am very carefully watching the NBN roll out. I know it is going to take a few years because it is a huge national infrastructure program, but it is something that we can all look forward to with some degree of excitement and anticipation. It is the largest nation-building project in Australia’s history. It will lift us in Australia to the top of the world rankings in broadband access. It will drive major productivity and growth opportunities and it will also ensure our children get the best education available in the world.

The NBN will deliver high-speed broadband to all premises in Australia, no matter where they are. Every home, every business, every school and every hospital will be included and no-one will miss out. Under the NBN, 93 per cent of premises will be connected with fibre-to-the-premises technology which will provide speeds of one gigabit per second, and the 10 per cent of Australians who live outside the footprint will receive faster and cheaper broadband from the next generation of satellite and wireless technology.

In my area it is something that people are quite excited about. Members who were talking earlier on were saying: ‘It was a quick fix for an election.’ That is absolute rubbish. It is a solution for the long-term benefit of the country, including our rural and regional areas. This is something that we in the Australian Labor Party are good at—national public infrastructure and doing things that are of benefit for all Australians wherever they reside, whatever their background and whatever their means. There are also some benefits in parity of pricing with the regions and with the city, and that is a good thing because it does not always happen.

There is another part to this which involves some of the benefits. We know telehealth can enable remote consultations, remote home-based monitoring of chronic disease patients and the aged and remote training of medical professionals. Without getting into a definition of remote, there are some places in my area that are remote in terms of access and this will help dramatically to overcome it. Studies in Australia have found that the steady state benefits to Australia from widescale implementation of telehealth may be in the vicinity of between $1.9 billion and $4 billion per annum.