Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to raise again the woefully inadequate situation we face in regional Australia when it comes to broadband. When you look at the patchy provision of broadband across my own district and then you multiply that out to what is happening right the way across regional Australia you can only conclude that we are living in a broadband backwater. The Howard government’s approach to broadband infrastructure has been to waste hundreds of millions of dollars pork-barrelling and patching up an inadequate system with inadequate solutions.

That has left us in the position where Australia ranks 17th out of 30 countries surveyed by the OECD for the take up of 256 kilobits per second broadband, where the World Economic Forum ranks Australia 25th in terms of available internet bandwidth and Australia’s networked readiness as 15th and falling and where a recent World Bank study confirms that Australia has access to some of the slowest broadband in the developed world. Not only is it amongst the slowest in the developed world but also it is amongst the most expensive. There has been no national plan to invest in broadband infrastructure and no vision to improve access, let alone get us up to the broadband speeds of our international peers. What passes for broadband in Australia is a disgrace. While other countries enjoy broadband speeds of 100 megabits per second, we languish behind with a broadband standard of just 256 kilobits per second.

The reality of this neglect is highlighted in my own district. High-speed broadband is not available across all of my electorate. There is a patchwork of access. Some people are able to access the internet only through dial-up, with inadequate download speeds, inability to download or receive large documents and constant complaints of suddenly being disconnected. Some areas have access to ADSL broadband, but there are also areas where ADSL is not available at all, as either the technology installed is incompatible or the local exchange is not ADSL enabled. Some people have gone to the expense of installing satellite, where again the speeds and reliability can vary. Wireless is also being used by some, and again the speeds can vary significantly depending on the number of users.

We have been relatively lucky in Ballarat, in that Ballarat’s Neighbourhood Cable have invested in laying down cable throughout Ballarat and high-speed broadband and voice over IP is available for Neighbourhood Cable customers, but the majority of people in my district are still reliant on the crumbling Telstra network. Failure to invest in this network has meant that the capability for everyone in my electorate to access ADSL broadband, let alone anything better, is severely constrained.

We face the ridiculous situation in country Victoria where every time a community wants to access ADSL broadband we literally have to petition Telstra through their expression of interest system to try to get enough people signalling they want ADSL broadband before Telstra will even listen to us. Telstra set arbitrary high targets and even when a community manages to get enough signatures they have to wait until there are government subsidies provided to Telstra before they will do anything at all. At the moment, despite having enough expressions of interest, there are communities such as Haddon in my district still waiting for ADSL because Telstra say that they are waiting for another injection of special government funding before they can afford to put the service on.

At the moment the communities of Blackwood, Bullarto, Ascot and Yandoit are in essence petitioning Telstra to have their local exchanges enabled. We have run successful campaigns in Gordon, Wallace, Mount Egerton, Napoleons and Miners Rest to have their exchanges enabled with ADSL broadband. But the issue also exists in the heavily populated area of Darley, some 30 minutes from the heart of Melbourne, where, because of Telstra using RIMs to patch up a failing telecommunications network, there are now substantial problems accessing ADSL.

We are excited in my district if, through this process, we can actually get access to the relatively slow ADSL broadband, but we should be expecting even better speeds than are currently available. High-speed broadband should be available as a matter of course. The technology to provide high-speed broadband both to smaller country towns and to large regional centres is available now. It needs government investment to bring it to our door. Australia’s performance when it comes to access to high-speed broadband is amongst the worst in the world. The government’s answer is to go cap in hand to Telstra to try to reach agreement over funding for what, frankly, will be an entirely inadequate service only available in five capital cities. It will not provide a solution to regional and rural Australia. It will relegate us to being second-class citizens when it comes to broadband.

On budget reply night, Labor committed to an historic nation-building telecommunications investment for a national next generation broadband network. We have committed to invest $757 million over three years and to apply the equity from the $2 billion Commonwealth fund to a joint venture which will see 98 per cent of Australians’ businesses and homes having high-speed broadband, not via the patchwork that we currently have but via a high-speed fibre-to-the-node broadband network across the country. For the two per cent where this is not possible, we will upgrade satellite and wireless technology. We need government leadership to facilitate the roll-out of true broadband. (Time expired)