Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate this opportunity to talk about the National Broadband Network and what it is going to mean to my home state. Those opposite, who keep knocking it all the time, do not want to look at the benefits that it is going to bring to Tasmanians in terms of opening up, for example, opportunities in education. They do not want to know what it is going to do in terms of benefits to the health system. But we know that, in their state election, Tasmanians are not prepared to risk Tony Abbott, with his history of ripping a billion dollars out of the health system. What we do need to put on the record is that the Tasmanian state Leader of the Opposition, Mr Hodgman, although he is the runt of that litter, is supportive of the National Broadband Network and its rollout. He can see the future benefits that it will bring to the state.

What is really interesting in terms of the benefits the NBN will bring is that people like those opposite, Senator Barnett and co., who come into this chamber and relentlessly rewrite history, knock the Labor government for the way we have handled the global financial crisis, for the decisive action that we took to ensure that Australians kept their jobs. We talk about funding and investing in infrastructure; they had 12 years of neglecting it. They ripped money out of the higher education system, they ripped money out of the health system and they did not invest in infrastructure in this country. They did not invest in training. They did not invest in education. They did not invest in the future of young Australians.

So what have we done? The Rudd Labor government, during the worst financial crisis in my lifetime, the worst in over 50 years, acted decisively. We did not take the advice of Helen Coonan; we did not put our heads in the sand and ‘wait and see’ what happened. We took action, and that action has paid off. Have there been problems? Yes, there have. But when I was out at the Kings Meadows High School in Launceston a couple of weeks ago, opening their new classrooms, I can recall seeing the former Bass MHR, Mr Michael Ferguson, looking very, very uncomfortable, because it was the opposition who neglected education—Senator Colbeck and Senator whatever-his-name-is who is walking out of the chamber and whom nobody in Tasmania actually knows. Michael Ferguson was squirming in his seat because he was embarrassed that we were there to open a facility that that school has been waiting for for a long, long time. I would like to see those opposite, Senator Barnett, for example, go to the Launceston Christian School and tell the principal and the students and the community that their funding will be taken away from them. I would like them to go to the Launceston Grammar School and tell them that their desperately needed classrooms and facilities will be taken away—