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

They did indeed get rid of him. It says:

The Coalition will cancel Labor’s reckless and expensive National Broadband Network.

There it is in black and white. Not only was that taken to the election, if you go to the Liberal Party website today you will see that it is still their policy. It is right under the little bit that says, ‘We are about less talk and more action.’ I don’t think so. They say there is no argument against having broadband, yet here they want to cancel the National Broadband Network. They say they want a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to support it, but they have already decided they will not support it. If anyone needed an example of why this is not about transparency but simply about fulfilling this bubble-and-squeak dial-up policy, there it is.

I was also really interested to hear the comments about why we need 100 megabits per second. I could not think 30 years ago of why I would need the internet. I do not think Alexander Graham Bell wanted an iPhone. What we are talking about are services and applications that have not even been invented yet. It is not about the download; it is all about the upload. We are not only taking our country into the future but also making us at least comparable with the rest of the world. I refer to the report of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, which will let us compare one hundred megabits per second to the dial-up policy of the opposition. To download a simple webpage at 56 kilobits per second takes 23 seconds; at 100 megabits per second it takes 0.01 seconds. To download a movie at 56 kilobits per second takes a week; at 100 megabits per second it takes five minutes. Do not think we are alone here. Let’s have a look at the 100-megabits-per-second countries listed in the report: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Korea, New Zealand and Portugal. Singapore has a target of one gigabit per second and we are arguing about 100 megabits per second.

It comes as no surprise then that what we are seeing from the opposition is simply a continuation of the Leader of the Opposition’s misunderstandings about what is needed. When the Leader of the Opposition was interviewed on The 7.30 Report he said:

Well, Kerry, I take your point: that if you want to drag me into a technical discussion here, I’m not gonna be very successful at it …

Too right they are not going to be very successful at it. What we are talking about here are services and applications that are not only going to drag Australia into the future and drag Australia up to be comparable with the rest of the world, but also transform people’s lives. I find it incredible that people opposite, particularly regional members—

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