Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It has been a long temporary situation up there, Senator Macdonald, that neither the Liberal Party nor the National Party could do anything about. Tony Windsor has shown more vision and capacity to understand the issues for New England than the coalition ever could. Prior to the election, I attended a number of BERs in New England. We were revolutionising the capacity for schoolchildren in New England to be taught in decent accommodation.

They have an opportunity in New England through broadband to bring the best teachers into the classroom in real time, and not only the best teachers in the New England region, in New South Wales or nationally but also internationally. They can be brought into the classrooms to assist our education system and provide the best capacity to bring students forward into the future.

When you go to classrooms up in New England, it is clear. When you talk to the principals and teachers, you see that they are excited about having broadband in regional areas. They are excited about ensuring that their children and their pupils have the best opportunities. Tony Windsor is well aware of those opportunities. Tony Windsor has the vision that the Liberal Party and the National Party do not have.

When you talk to the member for New England, Tony Windsor, about what is needed in New England, you find that what is needed is not just education but also health. The National Broadband Network will provide an opportunity for e-health. It will bring the best physicians face to face over the broadband network with the residents of New England—the residents of Tamworth and Armidale—who do not have the facilities that we have in the capital cities. It will give those people an opportunity to see directly and have the use of the best physicians in the country for diagnoses of their ills. That is something that the member for New England realises.

When you talk to business people in the New England region, they say that one of the real potential opportunities for them in the future is to have broadband, high-speed internet, access to build the jobs of the future in regional and country Australia. It should not be, as it has been under a coalition government, that if you happen to live in a metropolitan area you get the best broadband. You should have access in the regional areas. Businesses in New England, in Tamworth and in Armidale, tell me that if they had the capacity of a hundred megabits a second, they could create the businesses in New England that will ensure that rural and regional areas like Tamworth and Armidale grow for the future. That is the benefit of the broadband network.

After 10½-plus years of neglect and the incapacity to come up with a plan that could be delivered, the coalition paid a heavy price at the last election on this issue, because rural and regional Australia know exactly the lack of competence and the lack of capacity of the coalition to deliver them an equal opportunity and a fair go when it comes to access to broadband. They know that it was the Labor Party, it was this government, who set about delivering broadband right across this country. That is what will drive future jobs, that is what will drive future productivity and that is what will drive the health of rural and regional communities such as those communities in New England.

As the duty senator for New England, I want that region to have more capacity to compete not only with Sydney, Melbourne and the other big cities but also internationally. When you talk to businesses in rural and regional Australia, they tell you about the problems they have had over many years around not having access to broadband—not having access to the speeds that would allow them to submit tender documents to the cities and overseas when they are tendering for complex engineering contracts. They do not have that capacity. The National Broadband Network will provide the capacity for engineering workshops and engineering firms in regional and rural Australia to compete on a level playing field with engineering firms around the country, because they will be able to use the new software programs that are available to build the engineering designs that are needed to compete effectively internationally. They will have it there and they will be able to use those software programs to build their businesses and create employment in regional and rural areas.

Yet what do we hear from the National Party, who should be and claim to be the defenders of regional and rural Australia? When it comes to the two big questions that face regional and rural Australia—access to broadband and access to building the communities—the National Party along with their coalition partners, the Liberals, are saying: ‘You should not have access to that. You should depend on the old copper network. You should depend on the decaying copper network. You should not have the same access as everyone else.’

On climate change, they do not want farmers in New England to have access to the computer technology that would allow them to analyse what is happening with the climate, how they could mitigate climate change and use the best computer software and technology to deal with that. The coalition have abandoned the regional and rural areas of this country, and they have abandoned them because they are Luddites. The Liberals are the Luddites of this parliament. They want to wreck the National Broadband Network. I just do not understand it. You would think, even on a basic, commonsense approach to the future of this nation, that they would say, ‘Yes, this is the way forward, as it has been seen to be the way forward in countries around the world.’ Those are countries that we must compete with in productivity, countries that we must compete with in providing health services to our constituents and countries that will move ahead if we do not adopt this new technology. The Luddites are in control, the wreckers are in control, the extremists are in control of the coalition and that is not in the national interest. (Time expired)