Gilmore Aaron: Telecommunications (TSO Broadband and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Gilmore Aaron: Telecommunications (TSO Broadband and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:673;Page:19313] 
AARON GILMORE (National) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to stand and support the Telecommunications (TSO Broadband and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This Government is all about the iPad generation whereas that party over there who wants to be in Government is all about blackboards. One of the things we are worried about is getting on and giving people what they really need. 
Clare Curran 
: Oh really? Skynet. 
AARON GILMORE 
: That member over there who just blurted out a comment has been wonderful. She pointed out the fact that she criticised us for being too slow. She turned round and said that there were worrying signs of backsliding in time for the Government to tell us how fast it would roll out the $1.5 billion programme. That was in June 2009. Then Ms Curran outlined in May 2011 that Labour consistently attempted to ask for more time to discuss the issues. She said that we were going too fast. One of the problems the Opposition has is the spokesperson on telecommunications. She sat on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and outlined all sorts of problems and issues. We had to delay one of the select committee hearings for 30 minutes while that member got her notes together. The member turned up and what ended up happening? Very little change was put forward. 
The select committee heard submissions over 3 days from a number of different parties from across the country including from a very interesting submitter one Jordan Carter. He is a Labour Party candidate. Mr Carter said the submission process over those 3 days was well done. He is now a Labour Party candidate. He may end up being the telecommunications spokesperson for Labour because he seems to have a little bit more sense and understanding of what operates in this industry than the spokesperson over there who seems to be more worried about her dress sense than anything else. 
Labour members’ understanding of telecommunications and information and communications technology is so inept that they could not even get right the security of their own website in the last few days. First of all they blamed all sorts of things—in fact they blamed me at one stage and a newspaper rang me and accused me of being the leaker of documents. That is outrageous. It was that party’s own website. 
We care about economic growth and activity. We care about getting our telecommunications sector to a position where we can grow the real economy and get things running. Labour does not. The select committee made some good changes. The process was appropriate. It made some neat changes particularly in some of the technical areas of how the telecommunications levy will work which no member from the other side seems to have touched on. In fact we agreed on some of those changes. I am surprised that no member from the other side has pointed that out. There was agreement on a number of aspects of this bill. 
I was in Christchurch yesterday when a major aftershock hit. During that time period telecommunications services went down again and were out for a period of time. To me that outlined the issue we have of the fragility of our telecommunications network. Many parts of the city that I live in in Christchurch have had many problems with the telecommunications network over many years. That was proven again by the processes that were implemented following the aftershock yesterday. I was on the phone doing a live TV interview when the 6.3 aftershock hit. I say that the telecommunications network worked very well and I was very impressed with that. But in our part of town the earthquake recovery work being undertaken at the moment is by contractors of the Earthquake Commission and their own email and phone systems do not work adequately enough to send files back and forth to members. That means they cannot undertake the processing work to assess claims for those people in Christchurch. This bill will facilitate a building and roll-out of systems and a network that will allow that to happen and speed up those sorts of economic activities. 
This is a good bill that brings in and speeds up the processes that we all want to see. It will create jobs and wealth. It will not create anything that members from the other side think. Thank you. 
Amendments recommended by the Finance and Expenditure Committee by majority agreed to.