Senator CONROY (Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity) (1:42 PM) —If a megabit was a widget you might actually be able to make your argument, but a megabit is not a widget—a megabit is something that goes down and up. What you are actually seeking to do is to take one definition to try to create a static widget, as I am describing it; whereas, in fact it is about the capacity to go both down and up. Are you saying that it has to be a megabit price for a download, for an upload or for both combined? A megabit is not a widget; it is not an individualised thing. It is the speed of transmission of a packet.

In a normal goods and services type of discussion some of what you are saying may have relevance. I do not know if I would agree with it in all circumstances but I could agree with it in others. But let us be clear: what you are attempting to turn into an inanimate object is actually a transmission speed. It is not a static thing; it is not something you can say, ‘There is a price for this thing’ because it does lots of different things. It is a packet that gets transferred at a speed. It is both sped up and down together. Those are the things that your analysis is short of.

Let me be very clear about this. I put it to you this way, Senator Joyce: there is only one way that you can guarantee that you will see constant benefits for regional and rural Australians, and that is to vote Labor. Vote for the Labor Party and the National Broadband Network. We are delivering more services to the bush in broadband then you have ever dreamed of. You make it sound like there are only a few people going to be on fibre. Something like 70-odd per cent of people in regional and rural Australia are going to get fibre. And you talk about ‘just a few people’ and that ‘it it only in the city’. It is not predominantly in the city. The majority of people who live in regional and rural Australia are going to get the world’s best broadband network to their homes. And your colleagues support a dodgy, leaky wireless network. To give you credit, you do not come in here like Senator Macdonald and cry after Opel, a dodgy wireless network. But let us be clear: your analysis is not based on a widget. The only way is through the Labor Party, which has given the ACCC real powers to deal with bad corporate behaviour, something that those on the other side opposed right to the end in December and which is committed to delivering cheap and affordable high-speed broadband to every Australian, no matter where they live.