Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Nash for her longstanding interest and support for the people of rural and regional Australia. Yesterday I announced a new wholesale network for Australia that will provide a world-class 12-megabit coverage to 99 per cent of the population at affordable prices. We are providing $958 million to ensure that, using a mix of technologies, a new state-of-the-art network will reach 99 per cent of the population and be completed by 2009.

The Communications Fund that I mentioned will provide an income stream to ensure ongoing upgrades of this technology into the future. Yesterday every member of parliament, without exception, was provided with a map giving intricate details on the rollout of this new network. This is a world first—a policy that ensures that all Australians, regardless of where they live, have access to affordable broadband. By contrast, Labor has released an uncosted, untested and undeliverable proposal that misleads people into thinking that Labor can deliver fibre to 98 per cent of Australians for only $8 billion. However, based on any reasonable assessment of their flimsy costings, their numbers simply do not add up. $4 billion alone is required for the cities covering 36 per cent of the population, so if you generously assume another $4 billion will get you another 36 per cent of the population, you have a total coverage of 72 per cent. That is certainly not 99 per cent and not even 98 per cent, but 72 per cent. We can call it 75 per cent to be really generous, and I am being generous today. This means that Labor will leave over three million premises without fast broadband service and no prospect of ever getting one in the future.

Labor’s forward proposal is now starting to unravel. Labor’s shadow cabinet minister and the member for Hunter, Mr Joel Fitzgibbon MP, has well and truly belled the cat with his comments in a media doorstop in Canberra today. The journalist asked, ‘Who misses out in that region under your plan?’ The shadow minister for defence replied, ‘Well, those things are yet to be tested.’ He went on to say, ‘We will roll out fibre to the node right throughout the Hunter region. Obviously there may be some people excluded from that.’ He then said, ‘We don’t have the technical backing to make those final conclusions.’ So now we have a shadow cabinet minister confirming that Labor’s proposal leaves many behind, and it does not even cover the Hunter region.