Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I accept your admonishment, Mr Acting Deputy President. The government’s failure to invest in a national broadband network as part of this budget represents a missed opportunity, as I have said. The significance of ICT innovation as a component of productivity growth in a modern economy is now well known. Continued ICT innovation, especially in the sphere of collaborative web 2.0 technology, relies on broadband infrastructure. Consider just some of the productivity-driving applications made available by true broadband infrastructure—and I know that I am preaching to the converted over there with a couple of you: teleworking and remote access, enabling a more flexible workplace; online stock ordering and management logistic services; cheaper internet based phone calls, enabling significant cost savings; virtual private networks and wide area networks, allowing for centralisation of small business resources, improving resource use and reducing costs; low-cost internet based videoconferencing services, saving on transport costs; and off-site managed backup and recovery services for small businesses’ valuable data, providing improved security and peace of mind.

The CEO of the major US telecommunications company CISCO, John Chambers, recently noted that he believed that these kinds of applications could lift productivity by two to three per cent, and possibly by five per cent. While Mr Chambers is obviously an interested participant in this debate, his view deserves consideration by virtue of his prescience in foreseeing the productivity benefits realised from the first wave of internet applications in the 1990s. Unfortunately, despite the desperate need for Australia to improve its productivity performance, as revealed in the government’s budget papers, Australia is not well positioned to take advantage of these. As Mr Chambers noted during his recent visit to Australia, Australia has to improve its broadband infrastructure or this country will be left behind. If Australia does not have access to world-class broadband infrastructure, the next wave of ICT productivity growth will pass this nation by.

In fact, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts admitted that the Howard government has failed to prepare Australia for the future when she said that Australia’s broadband infrastructure is ‘okay at the moment, but it won’t be in the future’. However, despite this, the 2007 federal budget includes no previously unannounced spending for broadband infrastructure investment—none; nothing new whatsoever.