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

I am embarrassed for the Labor Party today—the once great party that prided itself on its thoughtful and detailed policy prescriptions on behalf of the downtrodden, the oppressed and the exploited worker—because they have been revealed as mugs for big business. That is what they are. They have committed money for a policy on broadband rollout when Telstra and the ‘group of nine’ telecommunications alliance were going to spend it anyway. Telstra and the group of nine had committed $4 billion to roll out broadband to the commercial areas of metropolitan Australia. But oh no! That is lost on the Labor Party. They come along and pay $4 billion for the same service. This is an absurdity. Now that they have overturned decades of anti-privatisation principles and supported the selling of all Telstra shares, does anybody in the Labor Party really believe that is justified? Do they really now believe that the selling of Telstra to raise money to subsidise Telstra and other telecommunications companies is worth the surrender, when all of them are on the record in the past few months as still opposing the privatisation of Telstra?

The Labor Party cannot be trusted with the financial management of, it seems, any government policy area, let alone the budget. Under the fibre-to-the-node proposal, without any government funding, broadband would have been rolled out. The telecommunications companies must have seen Labor coming. They must not be able believe their luck today that the alternative government of this country is going to fund them for what they were going to do anyway.

In the meantime, who are the losers? The losers are those areas of Australia and those small businesses, families and sole contractors who deserve to have intervention by government on this. That was the purpose of our $2 billion Communications Fund. It was targeted at those areas of regional and remote Australia—together with the $162.5 million universal broadband fund, which would have made sure that people in disadvantaged circumstances were subsidised so that broadband was affordable. That is our governance structure, our communications policy: to ensure the proper rollout of broadband to Australians across the nation—with a sense of equity, not just looking after metropolitan Australia in the interests of big business.

Labor’s plan does not stack up. As the days ago by, more people—and, I suspect, some of the people the honourable member has quoted as being in support of the Labor Party’s current position—will begin to realise its deficiencies. Firstly, it is unbelievable. Only two years ago this same plan was launched. At that time, the then Leader of the Opposition, the member for Brand, attached $2 billion to that plan—and, for all intents and purposes, it has now been rehashed. He was laughed out of court then. Almost to a person, the telecommunications sector derided the plan as lacking any credibility because the $2 billion would provide only a very small footprint. Compare it to South Korea, which is about the size of Victoria. They had a $50 billion rollout. In Singapore, which has half the landmass of Sydney, the rollout is worth $5 billion.

So Labor are attempting a con here. They are promising something that is undeliverable. In attempting to do so, they will fundamentally damage the long-term interests of future Australians, because they are going to deplete the Future Fund by $2 billion—and that is only the first instalment. They will need to return to the Future Fund time and time again to continue to fund this madcap plan—if they are still committed to it. Only three hours after Senator Conroy first launched the proposal yesterday, he revised the figures upwards. He conceded that his $8 billion plan could cost $9 billion—and that was between the one o’clock launch and a four o’clock interview.

What sort of reliability does an opposition have when within three hours of its own policy launch it is revising its figures? Where are they going to get that extra billion dollars, to go from $8 billion to $9 billion? They will just go back to the Future Fund. There are no other coalition specifically targeted communications funds that they can abolish. The irony of it is that today’s matter of public importance submitted by the member for Rankin attempts, unconvincingly, to highlight issues for small business. Well, small business in regional and rural Australia will be the losers without the Communications Fund that the coalition has established and funded but the Labor Party will abolish. Small businesses anywhere in Australia, anywhere that you like, are going to lose out if they are not already connected, so you can forget many small businesses in Orange, Townsville, Traralgon, Ballarat—and the list goes on and on. The simple fact is if the honourable member were concerned about small business he would have fought to retain a target specifically for disadvantaged small businesses outside metropolitan areas.

But above all else it has to be taken into account that the situation in Australia is of world equivalence, although we want to do better and there is no argument here about the importance of broadband and the task that lies ahead. But we should also recognise what has been achieved by the hundreds of millions of dollars—more than a billion dollars—already invested by this government. The Labor Party has come late to this debate. I represent in the lower house the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I stand to be corrected but I cannot remember ever being asked about broadband in several years. But the government does not wait for the Labor Party to wake up to a pressing national issue; we actually go about the job. We have been onto broadband for several years and as a result its take-up rate across Australia is the second fastest rate of the OECD. Small businesses are amongst those that are able to take advantage of the new broadband access and affordability. This is something that is not in the Labor Party policy, and it was not addressed by the member for Rankin today. It is all very well to talk about connecting broadband but you have got to address the issues of pricing—and the biggest determinant of pricing will be the regulatory regime.

Something else is also missing from the Labor proposal—and I am not going to dignify it by describing it as a ‘policy’; it is almost a thought bubble, as it lacks detail, it lacks credibility and it is purely and simply political spin. The news for Labor, now that they have discovered broadband, is that Australians can access high-speed broadband right now; they do not have to wait for five years. Around 54 per cent of Australians in capital cities can access typical speeds of around 16 megabits per second. In fact, 91 per cent of Australians in capital cities can access speeds of around six megabits using ADSL2+ right now. So the problem is not principally in metropolitan Australia, but of course there is unfinished business. The problem is in outer metropolitan and regional, rural and remote Australia. That is the issue, and that is why the government, because of market failure, has specifically designed interventions such as the Communications Fund, which—I will say for the umpteenth time—will be abolished by the Labor Party.

The private optical fibre networks already available in the larger capital cities can provide connections at speeds of between 10 to 100 megabits per second. In fact, around 91 per cent of the population is already connected to exchanges offering ADSL and speeds ranging from around 1½ to 20 megabits per second. Around 2.7 million households in Australia can also access up to 17 megabits per second through the Optus or Telstra HFC cable networks. In terms of access in regional Australia, Telstra’s Next G network covers 98 per cent of the population and offers an average download of up to 3.6 megabits per second.

A great deal has been achieved on this government’s watch. There is no sense of complacency, let alone smugness, on our part. We will always continue to drive reform harder and faster than ever before. We want to provide broadband without exception, and we are prepared to spend to assist those in a disadvantaged position. But we are not going to hand over broadband, communications or any other policies to big business. The simple fact is big business is laughing all the way to the bank with the launch of this proposal because the proposal would be investing taxpayers’ funds, at considerable disadvantage to taxpayers, given the source of the Labor Party’s funding, to the benefit of companies that were already going to invest in the commercial areas of metropolitan Australia. Is there anybody in the Labor Party who believes that smacks of equity? Is there anyone in the Labor Party who believes that the sell-out of their long-held opposition to the privatisation of Telstra, which they now warmly embrace, is worth it? I do not believe so.

Australia has a good record when it comes to broadband take-up. We are about average in the OECD but, as I say, our country’s take-up rate was the second fastest, just behind Denmark’s. The residential take-up of broadband has increased by 63 per cent in regional areas and 41 per cent in metropolitan areas up until September last year, and it has increased since then as well. A major factor in broadband take-up is price. Australia has internationally competitive broadband pricing. A 2006 United Kingdom report ranked Australian residential broadband plans as cheaper than those of South Korea and the United States. In my view, the Labor plan or proposal or paper—however you wish to characterise it, except as a policy—gives no indication of pricing. There is no point in having access to broadband if you cannot afford it. The Labor Party have fallen for the three-card trick: they have disentangled access from pricing, whereas the two go hand in hand. Small businesses are taking advantage of the faster speeds now available with the greater capacity for connection. Almost one in five online small businesses use connections of two megabits per second or greater.

But, as I say, I do not want anybody who might be listening or eventually reading the Hansard, however small those numbers might be, to think that I or anyone in the coalition believe our task is done. Far from it: we know broadband will underwrite much of Australia’s future economic, social and cultural prosperity. But the government’s approach is that all Australians are entitled to share in that future prosperity. It should not be limited to urban Australia at the cost of regional and remote Australia.

ABS data shows that public investment in telecommunications infrastructure is growing at twice the rate of that for the rest of the economy. The government have committed $1.1 billion in the Connect Australia package to provide a platform for investment in next generation broadband infrastructure. We have the $2 billion Communications Fund to provide a revenue stream for ongoing investment in communications in regional Australia. We amended the laws in 2005 to require the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to consider the actual cost of a new network investment and the commercial interests of the infrastructure owner when settling access prices. That is the regulatory regime that I speak of.

That is a policy. The government have a long-held approach to the issue of the rollout of broadband. We know what is at stake. We have encouraged it for several years; the Labor Party have woken up one day and decided to pursue it as a political issue. They have reverted to form. They are politically lazy. They have cobbled together a policy that was released two years ago and presented it as a fresh, new paper. It is short on detail. It lacks credibility. They have a couple of companies in the private sector making up—at this stage, I hasten to add—only something of a cheer squad. If I were one of those companies potentially being given access to $4 billion at taxpayers’ expense, I would be cheering it along as well. But I believe it is going to dawn on a number of the so-called supporters of the Labor Party proposal in the private sector that it is against their interests, and we as elected representatives certainly believe it is against Australia’s interests.

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