With Ed Husic, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy.

Labor welcomes the research referred to today by the NBN CEO, showing a snapshot of benefits high-speed broadband can deliver to the Australian economy.

The message he delivered was in contrast to the Abbott/Turnbull Governments who have derided the NBN as a video entertainment system, and current Minister Fifield, who justifies a second-rate network on the basis that it's good enough to stream Netflix.

The Liberals don’t know why Australia is building a National Broadband Network because they never believed in it.

Labor does.

Players in Australia’s digital economy know that a better broadband network is good for business. It helps them build stronger firms that create more jobs of the future.

Today this benefit was described as the ‘NBN effect’, but let’s strip away the spin — this is nothing new.

It’s called the National Digital Economy Strategy that Labor instigated in 2011, which the incoming Liberal Government mothballed and started up again in September 2017.

The value of a first-rate broadband network is why so many have been crying out for the Turnbull Government to fix up its second-rate NBN.

At the time of the 2016 Census upon which the referenced research was based, roughly 83 per cent of active NBN users were on Fibre to the Premises, with 8 per cent on Wireless/Satellite and 9 per cent on copper.

Labor looks forward to NBN releasing the original report and making the methodology used to quantify social and economic benefits publicly available.

In a world where the movement of data, via fast download and upload speeds, is crucial to Australian businesses, the importance of a first-rate NBN is more prevalent than ever.