Hipkins Chris: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3728. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very happy to take a brief call on this particular legislation. I want to say to the Government first of all that there are people in my own electorate—and despite being in an urban Wellington electorate I have quite a significant rural hinterland in that electorate—and in the rural part of my electorate who are very supportive of the idea of getting better rural broadband. But the issue here is that many of them according to the Government’s definition supposedly have already got rural broadband—and yet it does not blimmin well work.The number of complaints I have had in my office from people whom the Government claims get 5 megabits per second rural broadband but who claim that they do not has been increasing exponentially. So they are getting flyers in the mail saying “Connect to this broadband service it’s great—you’ve got rural broadband.” But of course what it does not say is that in order to get that particular speed they have to be the only person connected to it at that given time. The more people who connect to it the slower the speed gets to the point where somebody at home if they have cellular connections getting faster connections through using a cellphone—and in some of these cases they are in a cellphone dead zone so they are not even getting that—is getting very very slow broadband speeds like the type that we might have had once upon a time when we had the old dial-up over the old copper network. In fact they were faster than what they are getting now with supposedly broadband connections.I want to say on behalf of the people in the rural communities in my electorate and I am talking about Whitemans Valley Kaitoke Mangaroa and those areas that they—Clare Curran: The Minister is writing it down.CHRIS HIPKINS: I hope she is writing those areas down. They do want rural broadband. The Government claims they have got it but they do not. Their rural broadbandis actually slower than what they would have got under the old dial-up system and the more people who are connected to it the slower it becomes. These are small-business people who might be working from home. There are small farmers in that area and they are not getting what the Government promised them.They will come to me and ask why it is that the Government is now spending all this extra money to roll this out to its next phase when the first phase is not working and why is it that they as consumers are paying for a service that they are not able to get. These are people who are paying now. They are paying for broadbandnow as of today and they are not getting the broadbandthey are paying for. The cost of that broadband is potentially going to go up because this is an extra tax and taxes ultimately get passed on to the consumer to the end-user.So the Government is increasing taxes despite its very clear pre-election promise that there would be no new taxes under National. This debate is the first one on the first of three new taxes that it has introduced with this Budget. Ultimately the consumer will pay the cost of it. It is yet another broken promise.I want to say that I support full broadbandavailability to all New Zealanders and I would support reasonable measures to do that where there is evidence that they were working and that they were actually going to deliver it. But spending $450 million—that is what we are talking about despite the fact that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has admitted that there is no business case or analysis of the Rural BroadbandInitiative’s effectiveness. It is staggering that the Government would spend this quantity of money without actually establishing whether it is any blimmin good. I can tell you now that the people who have been coming into my office to complain about the quality of their broadbandconnection are very firmly of the view that it is not any good and that they are not getting the speeds of rural broadband that the Government already claims they are getting.When the Government says—what were the numbers it gave—that something like 86 percent of rural households and businesses are getting speeds of up to 5 megabits per second it should put a very clear rider on it that it is only if they are the only person connected in that area. The clear reality of this situation is that in many of these rural areas particularly the rural areas closer to the city centres where there tends to be higher density population than in a rural area the broadband speeds are woefully slow—absolutely slow. We have got people getting in their cars with their laptops and driving over the hill literally into Upper Hutt because that is the only way they can get a decent broadband speed. It is good for the cafes in Upper Hutt if you are business person working in Whitemans Valley because you will end up going over to Upper Hutt and sitting in one of the cafes there so that you have got access to decent broadband because they are not getting it despite the Government’s claim that they actually are.I want to say over and over again that I support rural broadband but I want to make sure that if we are going to spend money on rural broadbandthen that is actually what is being delivered. It is not being delivered. The Government claims that Whitemans Valley has rural broadband. It does not. The Government has not delivered it and now it is saying that it wants to spend more money on a programme that clearly is not delivering what was promised.