Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a real pleasure today to be able to talk on this matter of public importance. I had the pleasure last week of addressing an MPI from the shadow minister for agriculture, and we have an MPI today from the shadow minister for communications. Surely they were two most complete policy failures when they were in government.

I want to bring a regional perspective to this issue today. We have heard about people in the suburbs who apparently have ADSL2 and have a reasonable internet connection, but of course people living in regional areas do not have that. I live that experience. I rely on mobile data for my internet connection at my house. It is intermittent. It is very poor. I am very excited about the satellite service, which I will come to in a moment.

But let us talk about Labor's record. They have been very critical of the government here today, but let us have a look at what Labor delivered, starting back when then Prime Minister Rudd and then Minister Conroy concocted the NBN on the back of a beer coaster, I believe, on an aeroplane on the way to Darwin. Remember? It was going to cost $4 billion—$4.4 billion was the original estimate. We have obviously come a long way from there. There have been a lot of developments in this space.

When I became a member of parliament in September 2013, the number of people that had access to the NBN was just slightly over 50,000. That was what the Labor government had achieved in this space in that time. In my electorate of O'Connor—I might be wrong; I may well be wrong, and I will come and correct the record if I am—there was not one person connected to the NBN, although I will make the point that the Interim Satellite Service was available to some people in my electorate.

And what a disaster that was. One of my first experiences as a member of parliament was being deluged with complaints about the poor service that people were receiving on the Interim Satellite Service. It was slower than dial-up, expensive and unreliable, and why was that? It was because the previous government had purchased a certain amount of capacity on the interim satellite. That capacity was swamped in no time flat—you are nodding your head, Deputy Speaker Coulton; you understand this very well—and the speed of that service slowed down to less than dial-up. People like me, who would have liked to have had access to a satellite service, could not join that satellite service. It was oversubscribed, so we did not have access to that service.

Of course, what had happened in the meantime is that, once the previous government had announced the NBN plan, not one cent of private capital had been invested in that space. There was not one private operator that was out there offering an alternative service.

Let us have a look at the government's record. We have heard some criticism of the government today, but let us have a look at what we have achieved since September 2013, mainly via the then Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, now the Prime Minister. He has a fantastic record in business and understands communications and business probably better than anybody else in this place. In the three years since we took government, we have passed 3.5 million homes. Three point five million homes are now in a position to connect to the NBN. By 30 June 2017, in just over six months' time, there will be 5.4 million homes that will be able to connect to the NBN.

We have heard a lot of criticism about the speed—that not everyone is getting 100 megabits per second. Well, let us have a look at what people who are joining the service at the moment are actually choosing to get. Only one in five people are opting for a speed greater than 25 megabits per second—only one in five. The opposition are proposing the fibre-to-the-premises model, at an additional cost of $2,200 per connection, so that everybody gets 100 megabits per second. But not everyone wants 100 megabits per second; that is borne out by the commercial reality that people are quite happy with up to 25 megabits per second. But, for 11 million homes, at an extra $2,200 per home, that is $22 billion in extra expenditure to deliver that service, which most people do not actually want. Most people do not actually want it.

But one of the major successes of the government in my electorate has been, of course, the launch of the satellite, which is providing a fantastic service to the 2,200 customers across my electorate that will no doubt choose to take up that service.

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