Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water) Share this | Hansard source

You should have heard of her, Senator Williams, because she got the biggest swing of any Labor Party candidate in the last election. She got a big swing for lots of reasons. She is a very good local member, but one of the reasons she got such a big swing was because she went out to the people in Willunga, Seaford, Aldinga—all of these areas in the beautiful south of South Australia—and told them what we are planning to do. What we are planning to do is to introduce a national broadband system. They had two choices at the last election. They had that cobbled-together collection of antiquated broadband policies that you were trying to sell to the Australian public, Senator Fisher, and they had our national broadband plan—a transparent plan that the Australian people had plenty of time to look at, because there was extensive debate about it during the course of the last election. I am sure that Amanda Rishworth went around to all of the places that I mentioned, and probably the entire electorate, to tell them exactly what it was that we were proposing to do with broadband, and they made a very clear decision in Kingston. They made the decision to support the Labor Party. They dramatically increased support for Amanda Rishworth, and one of the many reasons they did it was because they want national broadband.

This MPI is all about trying to delay what the Australian people want. It is very clear that Australians want to move into the digital age. They see it as the future, not the past. They see the Labor Party as the future, not the past.