Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the member for Lyons for introducing this important private member's motion. It is great to be in government, because now we can begin to fix the woefully slow and unpredictable NBN delivered by the previous coalition government. This is an issue for many in my electorate, particularly in fast-growing new housing estates like Mount Duneed, Armstrong Creek, North Torquay and Leopold. Many of these estates are just a few kilometres from the Geelong CBD, yet often their fixed wireless or other NBN service fails to deliver adequate data to stream a video or to work from home. Other townships on the Bellarine Peninsula, which are still receiving the NBN through old copper wire lines, find that they struggle, often only getting a trickle of data.

Before the Albanese government was elected, I implored the then coalition government to fix these frustrations for people living in my electorate. Almost 10 years on, the previous coalition government have failed to deliver. As a result, a large proportion of my constituency work in Corangamite relates to poor NBN. To put it bluntly, the coalition rolled out to Australians a cobbled-together mishmash of technologies. Today the NBN is prone, because of the decisions of the previous government, to dropouts. We have massive gaps, and it is incapable of delivering the speeds residents and businesses expect in 2022.

It was a Labor government which originally established the NBN. Labor set out to provide quality broadband to all Australians. We had a plan to do that, using the best available technologies, but the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments then mutilated the plan. Firstly, the coalition promised to build the NBN for $29 billion. It then became $41 billion and then $49 billion, and it ended up actually costing $58 billion—double the cost. The coalition told us the NBN rollout was complete, but that would be a very big surprise to the many families, home based businesspeople, GPs, pubs and schools who can't even get usable NBN in my electorate.

The coalition sunk an eye-watering amount of taxpayers' funds into procuring out-of-date technology. Who will forget the purchase of 60,000 kilometres of new but obsolete copper wire, enough to wrap around planet earth one and a half times? At the time, the experts told the coalition that it was a waste of taxpayers' money, but they went ahead anyway. Unlike the coalition, the Albanese government believes in enabling the NBN's full potential because, in the 21st century, reliable broadband is not a luxury; it is a necessity. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of reliable broadband as more Australians learned, worked, received medical assessments and transacted remotely.

The Albanese government has wasted no time announcing the expansion of full fibre access to 1.5 million premises by 2025. This will be done with the $2.4 billion equity investment over four years announced in the October federal budget. It will deliver a faster and more reliable NBN to more families, communities and businesses. Our plan will give Australians, who now rely on slow copper connections, the choice of having faster full fibre connections to their premises. Labor's plan is to make sure that households and businesses in the regions are not left behind.

The $2.5 billion provided to NBN to upgrade 1.5 million premises to full fibre access includes $1.1 billion for a further 660,000 homes and businesses in the regions currently relying on copper wire. It builds on our fixed wireless upgrade, which we're already delivering, with $480 million provided towards a $750 million upgrade of the NBN fixed wireless network. Network coverage will be expanded to cover an extra 150,000 premises that have satellite-only access, and all 755,000 premises in the expanded footprint will be able to access speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, with 85 per cent able to access up to 250 megabits per second. The upgrade will also deliver wholesale business-hour speeds of at least 50 megabits per second. The Albanese government's investment will ensure that around 10 million homes and businesses across Australia will have access to gigabyte speeds by late 2025.

This investment has the potential to deliver an estimated $20 billion in uplift in GDP by 2030 and will help to grow our global competitiveness. It will help to support thousands of jobs for construction workers, engineers and project managers in our regions and suburbs. The Albanese government's plan is to ensure that Australian families, businesses and communities are able to access the broadband services they deserve because reliable access is not a luxury; it is a necessity.

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