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

The government has failed on all counts to deliver what it should have delivered 11 years ago to the Australian people. Now that the government is staring down the barrel of an election gun, it has announced a belated broadband plan. Will the Prime Minister ever come clean and admit to the Australian people that his inability to grasp the importance of broadband has led this country into a telecommunications abyss? Of course not.

This is simply a two-tiered, two-class mishmash of a plan he calls Australia Connected, which has already condemned people in regional and rural Australia to a distinctly second-class service delivered by a hopelessly outdated wireless system. I have my own name for this government’s plan. I call it ‘Fraudband’, because what is being proposed by the government is a complete con.

John Howard has again failed the Australian people. He has again tried to hoodwink them by promising a substandard broadband plan that will do little to improve current levels of telecommunications infrastructure in Australia, in particular in my electorate of Swan. By doing so, he has yet again demonstrated his lack of vision for our future with the continual bandaid, quick-fix solutions he needs to get him through to the next election. Mr Howard has had 10 years—

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