Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a past pig farmer, I have heard squeals like those coming from the members opposite before. They remind me of pigs waiting to go to market—squealing and whining but not understanding the fate that awaits them. In this case, what is coming up for this lot opposite is the next election. Because when it comes to the need for a fast broadband service they just do not understand what Australia needs. Australia deserves better.

The importance of broadband to Australia’s future economic prosperity cannot be overstated. The presence of a world-class broadband network is fast becoming the litmus test of a developed country’s economy. We are engaged in a race where economic progress is now measured in megabits and gigabits of data; it is a race Australia is losing—a race in which we cannot afford to fall any further behind our global competitors. Broadband is the transport infrastructure of the knowledge economy. It will open new markets for Australian business and drive our future productivity growth as our population ages. Just as highways, rail lines, ports and energy grids were the foundations of Australia’s economic prosperity in the last century, a world-class broadband network will be the foundation of Australia’s prosperity in this century.

The statistics on Australia’s current broadband performance are damning. The OECD ranked Australia 17th out of 30 countries for the take-up of entry-level broadband, the World Economic Forum ranked Australia 25th in the world in terms of available internet bandwidth and the World Bank last year ranked Australia 23rd out of 30 OECD countries for relative broadband speeds. Most damning is the fact that Telstra estimates that it rejects more than 100,000 applications for a broadband connection each year.

Mr Ainslee Arnott is a resident of Kewdale. He lives no more than five minutes from the city and he has no access to broadband. He has applied for broadband many times with several internet service providers, only to be told that he lives too far away from the Ascot exchange. However, the Kewdale exchange is only 900 metres from Mr Arnott’s house. He told me at the broadband forum held in Belmont last month that not one single internet service provider is able to give him a straight answer as to why he cannot get access to broadband. My office continually receives similar complaints from constituents unhappy at being unable to obtain broadband access.

Adil Safdar is an engineer from Rivervale. He says he feels like a ‘football being thrown around from here to there’ trying to find answers as to why he and other residents in his street are unable to get broadband access. Peter Bull is a business owner from East Cannington who, despite living a mere kilometre from the Perth CBD, cannot get broadband access. He has been told he has to wait at least 10 weeks for a broadband service. What, he says, should have been a painless process has turned into an ongoing saga of phone calls and misinformation.

The inability of Australians to access high-speed broadband will have dire economic consequences now and into the future. This is particularly the case in education, as around the world broadband is revolutionising the way students learn. It is only Labor that has a plan for a national fibre-to-the-node broadband network, a plan that will drive an education revolution in Australia. By providing access to the world’s finest museums, libraries and institutions, high-speed broadband brings the very best of educational resources into universities, schools and homes. According to a detailed survey conducted in Britain, broadband is having a marked impact on children’s education. Ninety-seven per cent of children in the study reported that they used broadband internet connections to help them with their homework, and 58 per cent believed that their schoolwork would suffer without it.

In remote areas of regional Australia, improved broadband services will enable students and teachers to participate in virtual classrooms while being physically separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometres. Yet it is a sorry fact that, due to this government’s neglect of broadband infrastructure, our students are unnecessarily suffering and falling behind. A number of Curtin University students living in my electorate of Swan have no access to broadband. This is simply an unacceptable state of affairs for students at any university, let alone one of Australia’s premier learning institutions. Yet where is the government on this issue? The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Coonan, is content to fiddle while Rome burns.

Thousands of Australian families are being left in the digital Dark Ages because this government cannot get the policies in place to deliver a world-class broadband network. Only Labor’s policy will open the broadband bottleneck and deliver the vital investment in broadband infrastructure Australia desperately needs. Labor gets it. We know the importance of broadband for Australia’s future. Labor’s plan provides the needed infrastructure while the government is still living in the Dark Ages of the past. It is time for the Prime Minister to realise that the abacus is out, that slide rules were phased out years ago and that calculators are there but not quite. It is the computer that you need. (Time expired)

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