Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In this debate on the Telecommunications Legisl­ation Amendment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011, it is indeed a unique privilege for me to have the opportunity to follow the member for Fraser, for a number of reasons. One is to do with the very first example that the member for Fraser gave of why the 'superfast broadband', to use his words, that the Labor government is rolling out through NBN Co. is going to be such a revolution in this country. He said that it will enable those in remote areas to interact and have a consultation of sorts—a virtual consultation, if you will—with a specialist somewhere else, and that this is going to revolutionise the health industry. Otherwise—and he had to walk a very fine line here—that person could be left waiting for weeks to consult a specialist. I noticed he never referred to the fact that state Labor governments have presided over the at-times abysmal health system in this country, with various public hospitals having extraordinarily long waiting lists. That was conveniently left to one side.

Notwithstanding that, he made the point about this revolution that is coming as a result of superfast NBN broadband. He must not have been here in question time. Where were you, Member for Fraser, in question time? Had he been here listening he would have heard the Minister for Health and Ageing and the Prime Minister wax lyrical about the revolution in health. It was a matter of only a couple of days ago that the Prime Minister was in Darwin and the health minister was in Adelaide and they undertook a consultation between a specialist and a patient, one in Adelaide and one in Darwin. There is no NBN, but this happening now. In fact, the government was crowing about it in question time. There is no need for the expenditure of some $53 billion of taxpayers' funds to build the NBN; it is happening today. What an unfortunate choice the member for Fraser made for his very first example of how the NBN is going to change the way Australians will live.

I am also a little intrigued, following on from the member for Fraser, about the way in which the Labor Party seems to have taken to its beating bosom the notion that the NBN is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. We hear it from member after member as they trot out their various speaking points. They have the fever—the new religion—that the NBN is going to be the thing that changes the world. You can almost hear them all saying 'amen' in unison as the various members of the Labor Party stand up. It was fascinating to hear that it is not just fast broadband, high-speed broad­band or a somehow faster form of broadband. What we kept hearing from the member for Fraser, over and over again, were those two words that, almost for dramatic effect, he ran together: 'superfast broadband' he kept saying.

I am intrigued. There was an article only a week or so ago that spoke about the opport­unity there might be for new technologies to allow data transfer speeds of up to one terabit per second. We have the government talking about superfast broadband at 100 megabits per second. I would love to see the member for Fraser come back into the House, if we do have one-terabit data transfer rates, and talk about 'super-super fast-fast' broadband or some such thing. You can almost sense the excitement. I know I was excited listening to it, but I have to say, the Labor Party is like any good spiv with a silk tie. Unfortunately, the Labor Party is filled with salesmen. It is filled with salesmen rather than people who actually know what they are talking about.

We also heard the member for Fraser wax lyrical about saturation problems with wireless technology. A country of 22 million people potentially has saturation problems with wireless technology! I interjected, but I am not sure whether it was picked up by Hansard. I asked, 'What do they do in India and China?' The last time I checked, the populations of those countries were a little bit bigger than ours. And, the last time I checked, those countries had full access to mobile telephony and full access to data transfer. I think even Korea and Japan do, as well. So just maybe the argument that wireless technology cannot deliver these same outcomes is a little bit spurious. The reality is that, like everything from the Labor Party, it is a case of 'Sell the sizzle but not the sausage'. This party is the sausage factory extraordinaire. This Labor Party is just feeding in the rubbish and hoping that what it can sell is the sizzle. It will get up and speak in debates like this about how it is going to provide superfast broadband, about how it is going to help 80-year-old pensioners or about how it is going to be the glorious revolution of the health industry, despite the fact that their own minister and Prime Minister, at lunchtime and in question time today, highlighted that they are already doing the things that the member for Fraser was saying were only going to possible because of NBN Co. Do you know what else is possible? Not only are his examples redundant, not only will the NBN be potentially redundant—

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