Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday we saw just how out of touch this government is with the needs of regional and rural Australians, and we have heard it again today in this MPI debate. Families and businesses in regional Australia have been crying out for high-speed broadband for a long time. For 11 years regional Australia has had to endure broadband speeds that are slower than those of our metropolitan centres, and yesterday the Howard government basically guaranteed that this would continue—by cementing a two-tiered system across the nation. Yesterday’s announcement is the 18th time the Prime Minister has claimed that he is going to fix Australia’s broadband problems. If, as we are so often asked by the Prime Minister, we are to judge him on his record, we should not get too excited about his latest attempts to provide a high-speed broadband service. Communities throughout my electorate and regional Australia have been crying out to access just ADSL broadband, let alone any of the technology that can provide faster speeds.

Businesses in my district have had to relocate to Melbourne because they could not access even ADSL broadband. Students have struggled to study online without access to fast and affordable broadband, and businesses in our district have failed to grasp economic opportunities because of it. Yesterday’s attempt unfortunately underlines the fact that John Howard is not focused on providing regional and rural Australia with permanent infrastructure that will guarantee the fastest and most affordable internet access possible; rather, he is focused on the cheapest and fastest political fix. It did not even take 24 hours before members of his own government were criticising the policy. The Prime Minister’s plan relegates millions of Australians to a second-class service. Unfortunately, many of these Australians are in my electorate of Ballarat. Once again, regional Australia is the poorer cousin to the cities. If the Prime Minister thinks that regional and rural communities will thank him for giving them access to a wireless network which is untried and unreliable, while at the same time he is rolling out fibre to the node in the cities, he is gravely mistaken and even more out of touch than I thought. Equally outrageous is that the Liberal Party has been able to dud regional Australia without a murmur from the National Party. The National Party rolled over on the sale of Telstra and now they have rolled over on high-speed broadband for regional communities.

The question that the Prime Minister will not be able to answer for the millions of families and businesses in regional areas is: if wireless technology is so good, then why doesn’t he connect his two homes—Kirribilli and the Lodge—his office and his department to a wireless network and cut the cable? Why doesn’t he connect Parliament House to wireless technology and cut the cable? The answer is: he will not do that because it is technology which is inferior to fibre to the node. If it is good enough for Parliament House, if it is good enough for the Prime Minister in Kirribilli House, it is good enough for regional Australia. If the Prime Minister thinks this will be acceptable to regional communities, it only highlights what an outdated view he has of regional and rural Australia. The internet is not something that only people in the cities use. People and businesses in regional and rural Australia use the internet—and they do not use it just to send a few emails every now and again. They use it in more innovative and sophisticated ways than we could have imagined even a year ago. Yesterday the Prime Minister demonstrated not only that his government has only quick political fixes to serious problems but also that he has limited knowledge about broadband technology and regional and rural Australia. Yesterday in question time the Prime Minister claimed that five communities in the Ballarat electorate would be able to access OPEL ADSL2+ under his government’s whiz-bang broadband policy. He said:

The map—

this map which I have here, which the Prime Minister held up in question time—

shows that one, two, three, four, five areas in the electorate of Ballarat are going to get the benefit, starting this year—starting almost immediately.

Out of the five communities the Prime Minister claimed would be able to access OPEL ADSL2+, only three are, in fact, in the electorate of Ballarat. The other two are in the electorates of McEwen and Calwell, and two of the three areas already have high-speed broadband access and would notice little, if any, difference with the Prime Minister’s proposal. I do not know who put these maps together, but I am pretty sure that the kids at Bacchus Marsh Preschool could have done a better job, because Bacchus Marsh—a town of some 8,000 people—is left off this map altogether. The problem with ADSL2 is that there is no guarantee that it will be able to deliver the speeds that the Howard government claims it will. (Time expired)

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