Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today Senator Conroy said that the government has been exposed for revealing what it is all about. That is absolutely true. Today the government has been exposed. It has been revealed to be committed to providing fast broadband service to the Australian population wherever it is found—to 100 per cent of the population, not just to a few people living in major cities and regional centres, as would be the case under the Labor proposals. The government is very proud to have been revealed to be committed to providing this high-technology service to the whole population of Australia. We are very proud of that because broadband is now a basic tool of business. People rely on the internet in business, just as they do in their personal lives, to acquire information for their businesses and, at a personal level, to download videos and movies. As I said, the most important and the most outstanding feature of the government’s proposal is that it is to go to every nook and cranny of Australia. It will reach, in fact, 100 per cent of the Australian population.

Let us have a look at what the government is providing under Australia Connected. It is a program which will provide fast, affordable broadband for all citizens of this country. It will provide broadband at speeds 20 to 40 times faster than those in use by most customers today. In the built-up areas of our cities, and major regional centres, this speed will jump to 20 to 50 megabits per second—a really fast and outstanding service to the people of Australia. The centrepiece of Australia Connected is the immediate rollout of a new, competitive, state-of-the-art wireless broadband network which will extend high-speed broadband to 99 per cent of the population and provide speeds of 12 megabits per second by 2009.

By 2009, 99 per cent of Australian households and small businesses will be able to access a high-speed broadband service which has the capacity for live video streaming, five-second CD downloads and multichannel television. So, if you are living up in Wyndham on the far north-west coast of Australia, you will get multichannel television and fast downloads. It is hard to imagine anywhere more remote than Wyndham, except perhaps Kalumburu, which is a little further up on the north-west coast. The Aboriginal people in that community will have these benefits also.

Let us see what the composition of Australia Connected is. First of all there is a new national high-speed wholesale network. The awarding of the $600 million competitive grant for this will deliver a mix of fibre-optic, ADSL2 and wireless broadband platforms to rural and regional areas of Australia. This rollout has been boosted with the addition of $358 million in funding to ensure coverage for 99 per cent of the population. That is the great strength of this program. This innovative, outstanding, remarkable program announced today by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts is going to deliver state-of-the-art, high-speed broadband connections to Australians wherever they live in this country. It is not going to concentrate just on capital cities and larger regional centres. People in even the most isolated areas—the most remote areas—will have access to high-speed broadband, and that is something that, as senators and Australians, we should congratulate the government on.