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

I rise in support of the bill. I want to take up where I left off on this issue yesterday—that is, the importance of having modern broadband in Australia for future generations. What we have heard today is the wrecking ball of the Liberal Luddites on the other side of the chamber. They want to argue that we should continue with copper wire that is decaying, copper wire that is not providing proper broadband services to this nation. If we continued and we accepted the Luddite approach of the opposition, the capacity for this country to compete internationally in a modern economy would be nil, because to compete internationally you need access to the best technology.

What do the opposition say? They say, as they said for 11½ years, ‘We should just wait and see what happens; in five or six years time there might be a new technology that will make everything better.’ We all know—we do not all know; probably the opposition do not know—that the technology we are proposing is the technology of the future. It is the technology that will take this country forward. But you are not interested in taking the country forward. You want the country to continue to have the worst technology, a decaying technology, a technology that requires millions and millions of dollars to maintain. It is not—