Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts. Will the minister outline to the House how the Morrison government is supporting the road to recovery through the pandemic through its ongoing investment in the digital economy?

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wentworth, who has very distinctive expertise when it comes to the digital economy, including from his time, including from his time as Australia's Ambassador to Israel, a country with remarkable achievements when it comes to the digital economy, a country from which we can learn much but a country against which we can in many ways compare very favourably as well.

The platform for our digital economy is the National Broadband Network, and 99 per cent of premises around the country are now able to connect—11.7 million premises. There are 7.4 million that are connected. That number is up 31 per cent in just one year. Around 30,000 a week are connecting to the NBN. Every two weeks, we are connecting more people to the NBN than were connected to the fixed-line network in the entire six years that Labor were in power. We're also seeing a huge rise in the amount of data being carried over the NBN—297 gigabytes a month in June 2020, up from 27 gigabytes just eight years before. It is an extraordinary increase in the amount of data. Over two-thirds of Australians on the NBN are now getting a speed of 50 megabits per second or higher. Of course, the prices are coming down. From 2014-15 to 2018-19 the price of the 50-megabit-per-second plan came down by 37 per cent, according to the ACCC.

This is delivering real efficiencies to small businesses—cheaper and more widely available broadband that lets small businesses use the latest software delivered over the cloud, that lets them serve a bigger addressable market and that gives people more choice in where to locate their business. Businesses like Power Creative, a video-content production company in Blacktown, use the NBN with cutting-edge software so that their clients can view and comment on their content in real time, as it's being edited. David and Erin Power credit the NBN with helping them to expand their business. Of course, we're already preparing for the growth of 5G with an auction of spectrum coming up next year.

The NBN is key to our nation's economic recovery. Just imagine if we were still back in Labor's NBN, with barely over 50,000 premises after six years. It was like the Soviet five-year plans exhorting the comrades to increase their tractor production, but the fact is they missed their 2013 target by 80 per cent. They missed it by 80 per cent: no order of the Soviet revolution for the current Leader of the Opposition when he was the minister for broadband! He missed the targets hopelessly. We're delivering, and it's a platform for the growth of our digital economy and the way out of this current economic downturn.