Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

On top of that massive investment in broadband, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Coonan, recently announced a further $162½ million for the Australian Broadband Guarantee, a guarantee that every Australian can access an affordable broadband service regardless of where they live. The government will also invest for their future through the $2 billion Communications Fund, with a substantial income stream coming online from the fund by mid-2008. The government will continue to provide leadership with regard to shaping Australia’s broadband future. It will foster investment confidence through a stable yet responsive regulatory environment, through targeted investment to areas of market failure and by ensuring there are incentives to invest in next generation broadband infrastructure.

We have a comprehensive, integrated and targeted policy and approach to broadband—and it is working. It is working extremely well. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in September last year Australia had 3.9 million broadband subscribers. Around a third of all Australian homes have broadband. The residential take-up of broadband increased by 63 per cent in regional areas and by 41 per cent in metropolitan areas in the year to September 2006. A major factor in broadband take-up is price. Australia is internationally competitive on broadband pricing. A 2006 United Kingdom report ranked Australian residential broadband plans as cheaper than those of South Korea and the United States—often held up as world benchmarks with regard to, firstly, the availability of broadband and, secondly, its affordability.

Speed is essential to broadband if it is to achieve our hopes and ambitions for it. Almost 90 per cent of Australian households are connected to exchanges providing speeds of between two megabits per second and eight megabits per second, which provides bandwidth to download movies, conduct videoconferencing, play games, teleconference and undertake everyday internet and email use. Nearly 50 per cent of the population can access even higher speeds of between 12 and 20 megabits per second from ADSL2+ broadband pay TV cable networks. Fixed wireless networks provide speeds of up to two megabits per second to almost 6½ million premises in Australia, including around 800,000 that cannot access ADSL broadband. There are now four third-generation mobile phone networks operating in Australia, all of which offer broadband services. Since March 2005 the number of broadband subscribers on 1½ megabits per second speed connections or greater has doubled, to 1.1 million. Small businesses, which we heard something about in question time, are taking advantage of the faster speeds. Almost one in five online small businesses use connections of two megabits per second or greater.

So the government’s investment is paying off, and it has been especially targeted to the regional, remote and isolated parts of Australia. This is not a government, let alone a government policy, only for urban Australia, unlike the Labor Party’s newly announced proposal—I will not dignify or glorify it with the title of ‘policy’—which is substantially lacking in a number of areas. But we will have time in the very near future to carefully—and constructively, I hasten to add—examine this piece of paper that has been launched with some aplomb today.

We have invested in providing subsidised broadband to regional areas since 2005. There is especially, as I have mentioned, that $162½ million to support the Australian Broadband Guarantee, which is the latest instalment. That guarantee will fill in the remaining black spots in metropolitan, outer metropolitan and regional and remote Australia—in fact wherever these black spots occur. If required, further funding will flow from investment of the government’s $2 billion infrastructure fund. The next stage of the broadband story in Australia is to provide scaleable and sustainable next-generation investment in rural and regional Australia. That is why the $600 million is available to allow the rollout of a new open access network.

Let us turn our mind to the prompt for today’s debate on broadband, the release of a Labor Party paper on broadband. This paper has a couple of faults. Firstly, there is its funding, in that $2.7 billion towards the cost of this government owned broadband network will come from the Future Fund—set aside by the coalition government for future generations, given our ageing population. Interestingly, the Labor Party will now sell the remaining Telstra shares. They are now going to accept the privatisation of Telstra. On every other government reform—in every aspect of fiscal discipline and of course in relation to industrial relations and tax reform—the Labor Party have opposed us. They always oppose us on every aspect. Everything we have ever put up in 11 years they have opposed but as soon as it has passed through the parliament they have adopted it, despite their opposition, and—more than that—promoted it as part of their economic management proposals or strategies for the future.

Honestly, I do not know how some of them can look at themselves in the mirror. For instance, as recently as 20 November last year, a bit over three months ago, the member for Melbourne, who led this debate and has supported the latest proposal for broadband from the Labor Party, said:

A Beazley Labor Government will not sell any more Government-owned Telstra shares, retaining the current stake in the company and providing certainty to shareholders.

Oh my heavens! Only three months ago he was again ruling out the selling of any more Telstra shares. He now performs the ultimate backflip, saying in the parliament just now that it is with a heavy heart that he does this but that it is economically responsible to do it. It was economically responsible to do it all those months ago when you opposed us in the lower and upper houses of this parliament—and now, of course, it is in their political interest to support the privatisation of Telstra. But I will tell you one thing: this will not come as a surprise to the Australian people. They have always believed—with the Labor Party’s record on the privatisation of Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, CSL, insurance companies and anything else that was not nailed down—that they would eventually privatise Telstra.

Indeed, our own polling shows this. I will let you in on a little secret now that you have agreed to the full privatisation of Telstra. We have gone to every election—1998, 2001 and 2004—with the policy of the privatisation of Telstra even though, generally speaking, it was not popular, particularly in the areas that I and my colleagues in the National Party represent. But we stood our ground, argued the merits of it and explained it—and, for our support of the privatisation, we extracted a great deal for regional and rural Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure. But, despite Labor Party opposition to the privatisation of Telstra by the coalition, people always believed it would do the same on coming to office. And it was not a vote switcher, it was not a vote loser, because people always knew the Labor Party would eventually reveal its true colours as a privatiser par excellence, particularly having regard to its history.

So, within six months of the forthcoming election, the Labor Party have announced not only will they accept the privatisation of Telstra but also they would hasten the sale of the remaining shares held by the Future Fund—raid the Future Fund—to get their hands on the money. Nothing could be calculated to be more irresponsible or more of a betrayal of the interests of Australia and Australians now and into the future than to diminish the Future Fund. It was set aside and is growing to provide for the unfunded liabilities and future commitments of an ageing population when the taxpayer base simply will not be able to meet the health, welfare and social requirements of an aged population. The Labor Party are going to have to explain to Australians why, for short-term political gain, they are jeopardising the long-term future of all Australians.

On top of raiding the Future Fund of $2.7 billion, the Labor Party is going to abolish the $2 billion Regional Telecommunications Fund which has been set aside to make sure the most disadvantaged Australians can get reliable services in the future. By abolishing the telecommunications fund the Labor Party is signalling unambiguously and very strongly that it is going to fund broadband to a certain extent in metropolitan Australia. It is not going to use the telecommunications fund to target areas of need in regional and remote Australia. The Labor Party is abandoning regional Australia for urban Australia. Abolishing the $2 billion telecommunications fund, which was specifically established to support the infrastructure needs of rural Australia, is a complete sell-out. There can be no claim by the Labor Party of any interest in, let alone representation of, rural and regional Australia if it is going to abolish the $2 billion telecommunications fund.

This paper by the Labor Party, far from being a policy, has a number of other defects. Why would I, the representative in the lower house of the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, know this so quickly? Because I have seen this paper before, in large part. It was released by the member for Brand, in his role as the Leader of the Opposition, only two years ago. It was conceded by Senator Conroy in his Press Club address today that it is in large part copied—or plagiarised, if the member for Brand wants to retain the intellectual property rights for it. It was announced two years ago and no-one took it seriously then. It got next to no coverage publicly and it did not excite any interest from the private sector. Within days of its announcement, Telstra disowned it and said they would not participate, and everybody else in the industry said it was not an achievable plan.

So Labor’s solution is to rehash an established paper, throw money at it—money drawn from the Future Fund, with all the social and economic issues surrounding that—and abolish the telecommunications fund, which abandons country people. Labor’s proposal is not going to go anywhere, and it certainly will not go anywhere near regional and remote Australia. Labor cannot be trusted with the needs of regional and remote Australia, they cannot be trusted with this country’s telecommunications infrastructure and they cannot be trusted with Australia’s economy.

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