Today Senator Humphries was forced to concede that the Liberals, if elected to government, will abandon the NBN rollout in Gungahlin with no alternative plan to deliver high speed broadband. Last week Liberal Senator Gary Humphries was trying to claim credit for the announcement that Gungahlin is one of the early rollout sites for the National Broadband Network on the mainland.
Gungahlin is one of the first 19 mainland rollouts of the NBN, with 3000 premises to be initially connected to the 100Mbps fibre network beginning in March 2011. The NBN will deliver a 100Mbps future-proof fibre to the premises connection to over 90% of Australians, with the remaining households receiving 12Mbps wireless services, particularly for remote areas (see my NBN in Gungahlin Fact Sheet). The long suffering residents of Gungahlin have had to cope with some of the worst Internet services in the country.
The Liberals policy to dump the NBN, without an alternate plan, and with a long legacy of failure in addressing the issue of delivering high speed and quality networks or even a competitive telecommunications industry presents a real issue for all Australians, as well as the 25,000 jobs that will be supported every year through the NBN rollout.
Background
Last week Senator Humphries stated in a media release that he welcomed the announcement of early NBN deployment to Gungahlin. But this morning the Senator was once again caught out playing both sides of the fence as he admitted on ABC Canberra Radio that a Liberal government would scrap the NBN and don’t have an alternative plan. Below is a transcript of some of the comments from Senator Humphries this morning.
“Well Greg, as you may know, I’ve been quite vocal in suggesting there should be some action on improving the broadband upgrade of Gungahlin. The Liberal Party obviously believes in Australia getting high quality rollout of broadband. It doesn’t believe in doing that through the NBN. And the point it that we think that the NBN is an extremely dangerous venture in banking on a particular kind of technology in a way that puts a huge risk to the Australian community in the future as we invest $43b over several more years which may be the case to be a very large white elephant.
“We had a plan before 2007 to deliver high speed broadband through a combination of government intervention and encouragement of the private sector to deliver that. I’m confident that would have provided Gungahlin with those kinds of services in due course. Now, we need to work out how we deliver these kinds of services if we get in government in the wake of NBN being abolished.”
Senator Gary Humphries, 21st July 2010, ABC Canberra Radio (around 0915)
Combined media release by:
- Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT
- Andrew Leigh, Labor Candidate for Fraser
- David Mathews, Labor Candidate for the Second Senate position in the ACT
