Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased by and welcome today’s announcement and visionary commitments in relation to Australia’s next generation of broadband and communications technology—in particular, because I know so many of the electors in my electorate of Hindmarsh will be relieved that there is a major party vying for government that can actually see the deplorable circumstances that people have been made to endure for many years.

Every week, either in person, by telephone, by letter or out on the street when I am having a street corner meeting, people show their despair at the lack of service that they are forced to endure at locations well within a radius of 10 kilometres of Adelaide’s CBD. We have whole streets of constituents dotted around the electorate—the two most recent being Douglas Street and Mercurio Drive, Flinders Park—being told that it is not worth Telstra’s infrastructure funds to bother to give them access. These are suburbs within six kilometres of the Adelaide CBD in a metropolitan city in the inner western suburbs of Adelaide. This is not out in the rural areas; this is in inner city seats. This is ridiculous in this day and age. The government attempts to discredit state governments on a regular basis on the basis of their not spending enough of their water rates on infrastructure, but they cannot bite the bullet and build our nation’s broadband infrastructure themselves.

Labor will because, like the rest of the population, including industry, we know we need to. This is yet another area where industry—whom this government says it represents—have been active in the development of and the support for plans to bring Australia into the 21st century. Labor support these plans both conceptually and economically, and we support these plans because the last thing we want is the continuation of a do-nothing, backward looking government that has for far too long relied on clever conjuring and cheap tricks instead of working towards Australia’s future prosperity and the education, technology and infrastructure on which our economic future increasingly depends.

This government has no excuses for allowing broadband infrastructure, service deliverers and consumers to suffer year after year in a spiralling state of malaise. Labor’s proposal is to connect 98 per cent of Australians to broadband services with a speed more than 40 times faster than most current speeds. I seriously doubt whether 98 per cent of households in my electorate of Hindmarsh have access to broadband. Seriously, in the year 2007, we hear from constituent after constituent complaining that they cannot get broadband. I have to say, once again, that my electorate is an inner city electorate; it is not a rural electorate. If we cannot get the infrastructure up and running in an inner city seat like Hindmarsh, God knows what it must be like in rural areas. We are told that our telecommunications system is a reconstructed antique, that it is not worth much. It is not collectable. It is not even quaint or charming. It upsets people that in inner suburban Adelaide they cannot get access to broadband.

I have repeatedly sent letters to the minister outlining these issues and my electors are repeatedly told that the government will not invest in the infrastructure required to overcome the antiquated pair-gain systems that are dotted all over the electorate because it is simply not economically viable to spend the money. They will not deliver the access people crave because they are not nation builders any more. They are not responsible for driving the nation’s communications any more. They are not charged with leading the country from one century to the next, especially if it does not turn a profit. Where would we be as a nation if this were always the case? What kind of country or backwater would we be without the national drive that comes from institutional leadership such as we saw around the end of the 19th century? What kind of sorry state would we be in if trains, telegraphs and even the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the great Snowy scheme were not seen as economically viable? This distinction between investment rich and investment poor and forward moving versus nostalgia nurturing could not be clearer than the distinction between the policy advanced today by Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party and the history of this sceptical government currently in power. The bottom line is this: if we want our kids to engage in the industries of this century to get the education needed to make a good career for themselves over several decades, we need to invest in our technological infrastructure. (Time expired)