Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You’ll keep. Regional members who come in here and say they support broadband but do not support the National Broadband Network have some of the worst penetration rates in the country. They have people needing to travel thousands of kilometres for things like breast cancer treatments. We have already seen not only the promise but the actual reality of what e-health can deliver—the treatment of chronic disease in people’s homes in real time. These things can only be delivered on a ubiquitous fibre-to-the-home broadband network. The member for Bradfield said, ‘I don’t know why we need every house connected.’ Well he is welcome to pick the woman who does not get treatment. He is welcome to pick the child who does not get the NBN to their home. He is welcome to do that. On this side we are all about equality of opportunity, which is why only Labor is truly capable of delivering this NBN.

In terms of what the NBN is capable of delivering, everyone else gets it. I talked about Riverstone being the site of the first Sydney metro rollout. I went and visited Riverstone High School with the minister during the election campaign and I was touched to receive an email from a year 12 student, Michael Benz, who took it upon himself to analyse the policy the Liberals took to the election. What an intelligent person we have here. He said:

The NBN is a far superior proposition. It links all Australians to a superior connection with higher speed and lower latency. In the debate yesterday the opposition stated that Australians have no need for 100 megabit per second connections, but as Senator Conroy correctly stated the opposition clearly has no imagination for what this technology will do for all Australians.

What a smart guy. He is going to go very far.

And don’t just take it from me; I am happy to quote a variety of commentators about why this needs to go on without further delay. I am even happy to quote Harold Mitchell. As he said in the Herald on 1 October:

We now have an opposition with a ferocious commitment to ‘‘make broadband a battlefield’’ and Malcolm Turnbull has been appointed to ‘‘demolish’’ Julia Gillard’s broadband plans.

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The latest round in this sorry affair is that the opposition is calling for a cost-benefit study. The taxpayer has already shelled out $25 million for the implementation study …  We don’t need to waste any more time or money. We just need to get on with it.

I could not agree more. I also draw to the attention of the House to Senate estimates last week where, under questioning about the McKinsey report, we had departmental officials talk about the report and talk about the analysis that has been done. A Mr Murphy said the amount of analysis through the McKinsey report and other analyses of NBN far exceed probably the analysis on other infrastructure projects. So it is far from this being something that has not been analysed and has not been subjected to scrutiny. I put to this place that if you have had 18 goes and you could not get it right and you have all the commentary and everyone else in Australia ‘getting it’, then you should get on board and support this. I am totally in agreement with their ‘less talk, more action’ so let us have more action on this.

I was very interested to read this in yesterday’s Australian: ‘NBN a conspiracy against taxpayers, warns Turnbull’. Yes, it is a conspiracy right up there with the imaginary man on the moon and who shot JFK! I can see how the member for Wentworth would think this is a conspiracy as it is a conspiracy of universal high-speed broadband for all Australians, not just those in Vaucluse and Mosman. It is a conspiracy of targeting pilot education programs for children in households where their parents and their parents’ parents have never had a job. It is a conspiracy of in-home monitoring for sufferers of chronic illness. So if all that is a conspiracy then I am very happy to be signed up to it. I will end by saying that the shadow minister came in and said he had seen nothing like this anywhere else in the world, so nothing like this had gone on. I agree with him, because I have worked on projects like this in Cambodia, China, Singapore and Malaysia and I know that never has there been so much wrecking by such a weak opposition.

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