Page 4326 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (4.08): I thank Ms Porter for bringing forward a motion on this most important subject. Canberra is Australia’s premier regional knowledge-based economy. We have the highest concentration of knowledge-based activity in Australia, as measured by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research. Our R&D spend ratio is higher than anywhere else in Australia. We have more information and communications technology professionals per capita compared to any other comparable region in Australia. We have the most highly educated workforce in Australia. We also have the highest concentration of creative business in Australia.
Mr Speaker, Canberra was also one of the first cities in the world to introduce a fibre optic cable network. In fact, the rapid development of the information and communications technology sector has underpinned our knowledge economy position and ICT, as an enabling technology, has been the silent driver of much of Canberra’s growth over the past two decades.
The national broadband network offers Canberra the capacity to further leverage this competitive advantage, but it also offers new directions that will have enormous benefits for the broader community. High speed broadband will deliver data at much faster speeds than the internet services that are currently available across much of Australia. It will support the growing demand that Australians have for internet downloads. The NBN aims to deliver fibre to the premises to around 93 per cent of all Australia with speeds up to 100 megabits per second—download speeds about 100 times faster than those currently used by many households and businesses.
The benefits of high speed broadband will be pervasive. High speed broadband will improve the way education services are delivered, it will move us into the real experience of e-health services, it will level the economic playing field for regional businesses, it will allow our small and micro-businesses to present themselves to any market or customer they choose, and it will reduce the rate at which we all consume finite resources.
In a country as large and dispersed as Australia, there are many areas where it is not commercially attractive to build a network. The NBN will have national scale that will allow it to provide services to both profitable and high cost areas. The NBN’s construction is a highly repeatable, scalable process involving very similar modules rolled out across the country.
As my colleague Mary Porter has just said, I was delighted back in July when NBNCo announced that Gungahlin would be among the next 19 locations across Australia eligible for the early rollout of fibre. This week we have commenced the preliminary conversations with the company on how, when and where the rollout will occur in Gungahlin. The rollout of the national broadband network into Gungahlin is a very significant event for the territory and one that I hope all members of the Assembly would welcome.
The Canberra community are behind this all the way because they know high speed broadband will be the platform for new and improved service delivery and it will underpin productivity gains into the future. We know that wireless and mobile usage
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