Dana Wortley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate on a matter of public importance, one that affects all Australians: the government’s lack of a plan to deliver a high-speed broadband communications network for Australia. A fibre-to-the-node network would be a significant step forward for our antiquated telecommunications infrastructure. It would be a great improvement. But if the people of Australia think it is on the horizon of this government today then they are going to be greatly disappointed, because the Howard government is not delivering. It does not have any idea of how to deliver world-class broadband infrastructure to Australia.

While the minister is prepared to marginally improve access to entry-level broadband in rural Australia, the Howard government has no plan whatsoever for delivering world-class broadband infrastructure to Australia’s cities and suburban areas. In fact, the Howard government is AWOL when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure. And it is time the minister stepped forward and took responsibility for Australia’s floundering position among the developed countries of the world. We are ranked 17th out of 30 countries surveyed by the OECD for take-up of 256 kilobits per second broadband.

The confirmation on Monday of this week that Telstra and the competitive watchdog, the ACCC, have fallen out over the rollout of fibre broadband infrastructure has left the government without any idea of how to bring internet speeds in Australia up to world class. Today, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, France, Germany and Italy all have broadband speeds of over 20 kilobits per second while Australia lags far behind. The irony is that broadband is all about increased speed and productivity, and here we have the minister applying the brakes on Australia’s ability to access new technology. Either that, or there is a problem finding the accelerator.

The decision made in this place on Australia’s IT capabilities over the next decade will be absolutely critical to our economic prosperity. Yet we on this side have serious and justifiable doubts about this government’s ability to make up where they failed in the past 10 years, and we do not stand alone with our concerns. In yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald the director of the Technology and Innovation Management Centre at Queensland university and a world-recognised expert on innovation, Professor Mark Dodgson, said:

The impasse between Telstra and the ACCC and the Government is just a complete mess and it needs to be resolved …

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The Government has to step up, if Telstra won’t. Broadband is the basic infrastructure that the economy needs, it’s just essential, like roads or railways. It is entry-level stuff.

And a telecommunications analyst, Paul Budde, is quoted as saying:

… Australia was “running three years behind [comparable nations] and it’s going to take five years to catch up.”

And the gap is, at this stage, still growing. The article also reports that analysts warned that, the longer Australia waited, the wider the gap between Australian businesses and overseas competitors would become. It also highlighted the plight of Simon Grover, who runs an internet business. Mr Grover says he is ‘frustrated by having to use simpler technology’ to allow clients from around the country, many of whom do not have broadband, to use the service. He said:

With a business like this, it obviously makes it a lot slower and harder ... We have plans to increase our online range, but slow broadband take-up rates just make the process more difficult.

He also said:

If more people had broadband it would be a different story …

With Labor it will be a different story because Labor do have a plan. While John Howard and Minister Coonan sit on the side of the road trying to make sense of the map that might lead them onto the information superhighway, Labor are lapping them at a steady speed. We do have a plan for delivering world-class telecommunications infrastructure for Australia and, while we have made clear our position on the regulatory changes necessary to facilitate a rollout of a fibre-to-the-node network, the Howard government’s position is to retain the status quo and leave Australia trailing behind the rest of the world.