Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

He used to have such a good view on these issues until he got into the Liberal Party. I thank the member for Braddon for his question. The development of the National Broadband Network is going to open up enormous opportunities for improvements in the delivery of government services to Australians, and not just direct government services but also services that are largely financed by government, such as health and education services, and a range of other areas where governments are very directly involved. The National Broadband Network is going to open up great opportunity for innovation, for the development of better ways of doing things, for improving the quality of services and for diminishing the costs of government service delivery.

Neither the government nor anybody else is in a position to be prescriptive and to project precisely what these improvements will be because, inevitably, what is going to occur is a range of innovation, of product development, of new applications, of experimentation which will drive an evolutionary change throughout government service delivery and also throughout the private sector in this country.

I just want to refer to a few specific examples to illustrate the possibilities that the broadband network is going to open up. First, in education, by breaking down geographic barriers we will be able to have a situation where people in classrooms or tutorials will be able to interact with others on the other side of the country or on the other side of the world and with specialists in particular areas who will no longer only be accessible if they happen to be in the same city or the same town as that class or tutorial, which will inevitably involve an expansion of capability for education.

Second, in health, an example which is already being trialled now is people who are genuinely ill remaining in their homes, not in hospital, and being monitored on a round-the-clock basis by machines that can determine their heart rate, their blood pressure—

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