Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I could not help but notice that because the speaker before me was reading from a prepared speech he finished three or four minutes early in his allotted speaking time on the matter of public importance. Listening to that entire speech, I was struck by the amount of waffle that we have heard from the Australian Labor Party when it comes to broadband. All we are hearing is populist waffle. When one analyses what the Australian Labor Party has put forward and applies a little bit of intellectual rigour to what it is saying about its fancy broadband network, one discovers a couple of things. The first is that the Labor Party is very big on smoke and mirrors and flashing lights. It has had the big announcement and the big launch of their broadband network, but when one pierces through that and passes through the light show one sees that the Australian Labor Party is completely lacking in detail.

We have seen already a clear instance of the inability of the Australian Labor Party to come up to speed when it comes to details and fact. A case in point is the shadow minister. The shadow minister, Stephen Conroy, spoke at the Press Club yesterday and said at lunchtime that the Labor Party’s proposal to cover 98 per cent of the population at 12 megabits per second would cost $8 billion. But by four o’clock that same afternoon the cost had gone up by a billion dollars. We had seen an increase of a billion dollars by four o’clock that afternoon. This is the way the Australian Labor Party throws money around. It throws money around because it is not up to speed with the detail. I say to the Australian people: this is far too important to get wrong. The Australian economy is far too important to be left in the clutches of the Australian Labor Party, because its fast and loose policy record when it comes to both the truth and economic management indicates that the Australian people will pay the price for the Labor Party’s rush to try to get itself elected later this year. It goes out and says at lunchtime, ‘We want to cover 98 per cent of the Australian population for $8 billion.’ By four o’clock we knew that it was going to be 98 per cent of the Australian population for $9 billion.

What do we know about the actual costs involved? It is interesting that Bill Scales, who was Telstra’s group general manager for corporate relations, said two years ago that he anticipated the cost of fibre to the node across Australia would be in the tens of billions of dollars. To quote from the evidence he provided to the Senate estimates hearing of the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Legislation Committee on 14 February 2005:

The whole issue of cable is complex, as you began to discuss today. At the very least, it requires literally tens of billions of dollars of investment.

That is what was said two years ago. Independent experts have also suggested to the Senate that at the time the figure was not less than $20 billion. For example, Caslon Analytics is an Australian research, analysis and strategies consultancy and it said:

Estimates of the cost of rolling out fibre to most households are problematical; it is likely that expenditure of over $30 to $50 billion would be required.

We also heard from Professor Gerrand from the University of Melbourne in the same inquiry, who said, ‘I think a safer estimate’—that is, than Telstra’s $30 billion—‘would be about $20 billion.’ So we have industry experts saying that they approximate the cost of providing broadband to the Australian community not at the $8 billion we heard at lunchtime from Labor and not at the $9 billion we heard at four o’clock from Labor but at the cost of at least $20 billion. That is what industry experts say. That is the kind of detail that the Australian people rightly want to look at. Unfortunately, the Australian Labor Party turns its back on the costs.

Let us have a look at some of the comparisons internationally. We know the Australian Labor Party like to talk about South Korea. South Korea is a country that is less than half the size of Victoria with a population that is more than double the Australian population. There are 48 million South Koreans. Rolling out a fibre network cost them in excess of $A50 billion. I think it can be pretty much taken as a given that, despite the light show from the Australian Labor Party, their prediction at lunchtime of rolling out a network to 98 per cent of the Australian population for a cost of $8 billion—it was $9 billion by four o’clock—should in fact be a lot closer to, say, $20 billion or $30 billion. That is the true cost of what Labor are throwing out there and saying they will be able to do for $8 billion or $9 million.

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