Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (Senator Coonan) to questions without notice asked today relating to broadband telecommunications infrastructure.

We are once again witnessing the most amazing game of catch-up that we have seen for a long time. I have paid a great deal of attention to the issue of broadband for 11 years in this place. I have seen this government announce to all and sundry that in fact it was their view that Australians not only did not want broadband but they did not need it. We have witnessed 11 years of this government not only doing just about everything they possibly can to ensure that Australia was left behind in the economic sphere of opportunity that broadband offers, but they did so with quite a disgraceful alternative political agenda—and that was the privatisation of Telstra. That kept them focused on that particular objective and turned their heads away from the needs of the future of this nation in relation to broadband.

What we are seeing today is the minister desperately trying to justify this policy, as a catch-up to Labor’s forward-thinking, future orientated broadband initiative. But, as with most things that the Howard government attempt to do in the eleventh hour of an election year, they have got it wrong. What is sad and disappointing about the government’s attempt in this area of public policy is that they are creating a two-class system—a whole raft of second-rate citizens who will only have available to them the inferior wireless service that forms such a central feature of the Howard government’s so-called broadband plan, Australia Connected.

I say this because, today in question time, we tested the minister’s knowledge and understanding of the technology once again, and asked her very specifically to answer a question about the proposed speeds for the WiMAX technology that will service rural and regional Australia under their plan. What we know is that this technology cannot service a minimum of 12 megabits per second; it can service up to 12 megabits per second. What we also know from Elders-Optus is that it is likely to provide a speed of around six megabits per second. I would like to refer to a useful document, which I will refer to the minister to assist her knowledge. It is called Broadband made easy and is published by Ericsson. It gives the definition of WiMAX as ‘World Interoperability for Microwave Access’ and describes it as:

A new wireless technology that uses a shared base radio station for two-way communication for several kilometres around the base station. It’s used for fast Internet access and sometimes phone calls.

The document goes on to say:

Most service providers and manufacturers in their sales literature will give the maximum theoretical speed in Mbps—

megabits per second—

that their technology can provide (for example ADSL can provide speeds “up to” 6Mbps). In the real world, factors such as sharing with other users, distance, and interference will mean that the average user experience is likely to be lower than this speed. So the “capacity” or “throughput” of your broadband access will be less than the maximum “speed” of the broadband access. This is true of all networks.

And they use this analogy that I think is quite useful for the minister:

For example the signs on a freeway may say that the maximum speed is 100kph, but at peak hour when you are sharing the road network with thousands of other users, you may not be able to achieve this speed very often.

The minister seems to be incapable of acknowledging this technological fact. She failed to answer this question and, in fact, deliberately ignored it and my supplementary question about what is known to be severe interference with that technology. Senator Coonan also failed to answer questions regarding Tasmania, which misses out completely on the higher bandwidth technologies based on fibre networks. We know that they took this issue to cabinet and it is political. In relation to the maps, I found out that, in a slimy, dirty act, these maps were slipped under the doors of opposition MPs after 9.30 last night, when the House rose. What a typical Howard government slimy dog act. And the minister stood here and gratuitously claimed that everyone got this information in these maps at the same time. What a disgrace! (Time expired)