Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a self-congratulatory motion by a self-congratulatory government. They do not mind singing their own praises, but, of course, out there in the community it is not quite the case. The former speaker almost made the case there of the use of antiquated copper. My local paper, The Bunyip, which serves Gawler and bits of the Barossa, had the headline on 19 November 2014 of 'NBN work begins … sort of'. That is basically the state of broadband in Australia under the Turnbull government, the Abbott-Turnbull government and probably soon the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, after all those boos at the New South Wales state council on the weekend, where we saw what the rank and file of the Liberal Party thought about Prime Minister Turnbull's performance as communications minister and now as Prime Minister.

Let us go back in time. What did the Howard government ever do about broadband, except to do this sort of patch-up job around the place in response to the National Party's advocacy? The Howard government did nothing. It sat on its hands on this copper network for years and years and years, through warning after warning after warning about how it might affect our national productivity. And then Labor comes to power, puts in place the building blocks for the National Broadband Network—and not before time—and does things like getting the entire copper network off Telstra, negotiating those arrangements, setting up the NBN and actually doing all the groundwork for what will be a great national project, the biggest infrastructure project in Australia's history.

If the Liberal Party had got behind the National Broadband Network and made it a bipartisan project, after the years of neglect in the Howard era, we would now be talking about fibre to the premise. That is what we would be talking about. We know what happened when we started talking about fibre to the premise. I remember, in this House, members opposite saying, 'You want it so you can play computer games,' and all this sort of nonsense. What we know now, with the advent of a whole range of industries, is that people need this not just for leisure, not just for enjoyment, but for work. You only have to go to the Barossa Valley, to Gawler, to the outer suburbs of Adelaide—or, indeed, any metropolitan city—or to the bush to find out that people need it now. Farmers need it; farmers desperately need it. Rural economies desperately need it. It is the end of the tyranny of distance. It is information at their fingertips.

What have the government done? They promised they would build it for $29.5 billion and they are now estimating it will cost $56 billion. So they have doubled the cost of it—that is what they have said—and this is for an inferior product. They are using fibre to the node—the old copper network. So we have had a massive blow-out financially. They have said that they would be able to roll out the copper network, fibre to the node, within three years—that is, by the end of 2016. That was a commitment they gave. That has now more than doubled to the end of 2020, seven years. So whereas the coalition broadband policy in 2013 said, 'It is forecast that the large scale rollout of any changes to the network design—such as implementing fibre to the node—would commence in mid 2014,' of course it has not.

And what suffers in all of this? Well, business suffers; communities suffer. In my own community, in Gawler, we have half the town on fibre to the premise and the other half on fibre to the node. That is what is going to happen. This former Minister for Communications was made Prime Minister in the dead of night in a desperate attempt to breathe life into a sclerotic government with bad polling. It has not quite worked out the way they expected, but we do have a whole lot of new faces at great cost to this country. But let's not pretend that this has been a successful government in broadband. Rather, they are saddling Australia with yesterday's technology.

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