Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'A national tragedy'—not my words but the words of the University of Melbourne's Professor Rodney Tucker in describing the member for Wentworth's failed National Broadband Network. It is a description that would be endorsed by many people in the great electorate of Isaacs and, particularly, in the suburb of Patterson Lakes. I was recently contacted by a resident of Patterson Lakes in my electorate. This resident has, for eight years, been forced to access the internet through a USB dongle. Her family runs a painting and decorating business. Her son is a university student. Their last monthly internet bill for 12 gigabytes of data was $700.

In 2013, Prime Minister Turnbull promised that all Australians would have access to the NBN by 2016. He said he would do this for $29.5 billion. This cost has now doubled to $56 billion and in most places the network will use obsolete copper wiring. Patterson Lakes is not expecting an NBN rollout until at least mid-2018. The blame for this disaster falls squarely on Prime Minister Turnbull. It was Prime Minister Turnbull who dismantled Labor's plan for the NBN, which would have delivered optic fibre to 93 per cent of homes and businesses, providing speeds of up to one gigabit per second on a network easily scalable to much higher speeds in the future. It was Prime Minister Turnbull who promised an NBN that was 'fast, affordable and sooner' but then failed to deliver.

When it comes to nation-building, the Liberal Party cannot be trusted. From the Snowy Mountain Hydro scheme to Gonski needs-based funding and all the way to the NBN, the only thing that Prime Minister Turnbull has been capable of is tacking cheap three-word slogans or '2.0' onto Labor's visionary ideas. In the last three years, Australia has plummeted from 30th in the world for internet speeds to 60th. We are now behind most of Europe. We are behind the United States, Canada and New Zealand. We are even behind Romania, Russia, Poland and Slovakia. Prime Minister Turnbull's second-rate copper NBN is holding Australia back. Our competitiveness as a nation will suffer as the Liberals continue to roll out last century's technology, and opportunities for Australian enterprise and innovation will be lost to overseas markets—and the jobs will follow.

Just a week ago, I visited Monterey Secondary College, south of Patterson Lakes, to speak with their VCAL students about the jobs of the future. One of the main themes underlying my conversation with the students was the fact that the internet and our online interconnectedness will significantly shape the nature of employment in the future. Prime Minister Turnbull's mismanagement is not merely a botched effort of rolling out a bunch of cables underground; he is robbing students like the ones I spoke to of the opportunity to seize the best of what the future holds. Only Labor will deliver on that promise.