Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Ludwig points out, he comes from Queensland and he knows a lot more about you, Senator Macdonald, than I do. This is all about the future. The future involves fast broadband. That is not to say that we will not have wireless. Of course we are going to have wireless. Lots of people will have wireless, maybe in Maitland, for example. I do not know whether they get fast broadband over there, but they would like some wireless.

What fast broadband enables you to do is have wireless in your own house. That is what a lot of families do. They connect to ADSL at the moment, but they have a number of laptops. The children, in particular, have laptops at school thanks to our education revolution. They can go home and they can access the computer so they can download their movies, their TV programs or whatever else it is that they might want to do on the internet.

Our fast broadband is going to speed that up. We are going to speed up access on wireless. I am not an expert on this, but I understand that this new fast broadband might be up to 10 times as fast as wireless is able to provide at the moment. In other words, we will still give people the option of having wireless but will enable that at a much faster speed so that people can access whatever they want to do on the internet at a very much faster speed. We are all about choice—not about Work Choices; we know what Work Choices was all about. This is about choice: broadband, wireless and freeing up the system that at the moment is quite restrictive.