Peter Andren (Calare, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The internet was promised as the information superhighway, but just as country Australia has put up with a mix of some highway, some main road, potholed or unpaved rural road and bush track for so long in this vast continent so too around 70 per cent of the country is apparently condemned to barely main road and bush track telecommunications in the years ahead.

Nothing in the government’s plans for regional telecommunications, and very little more in Labor’s plan announced yesterday, is going to realistically address the broadband demand for rural Australia outside the major centres because the market is just not interested. Any plan to deliver universal broadband to all Australians will simply not be feasible under private-public partnerships alone. However a future Labor government might structure and fund such a partnership, whether from selling shares in a company it vowed never to privatise or through other means, the fact remains that around two-thirds of the Australian mainland will simply not deliver a private operator any profit unless the pricing regime dramatically changes. Is this the way that it is going to be made attractive?

The Nationals’ own 2005 Page report showed it could cost up to $7 billion to provide fibre optic broadband to the majority of Australian households. Labor’s plan, I understand, is to provide it to the node at the street corner. Which street corner in Tottenham, for instance? Or which street corner in outback New South Wales, where a collection of properties could be spread over hundreds of square kilometres?

Telstra, by the way, have put a figure of $25 billion on universal broadband delivery. That is the price they have put on it. That is the sort of money we are talking about if we are serious about making the superhighway via a homogenous network available to all Australians wherever they live, because the pastoral operation at Louth is as important as a stock agency in Blayney or perhaps a real estate agency in Katoomba. Singapore is spending $5 billion to deliver fibre to the home, on an island city state, which puts the cost of providing fibre optic broadband to all Australians in some sort of perspective.

It is misleading, as it was when the Labor government agreed to switch off analog mobiles in the nineties, to accept delivery of services to 90 per cent of the population as getting the job done. That would cover the so-called ‘Golden Banana’ between Brisbane and Adelaide, and the other major cities. It does not mean that 90 or 98 per cent of the country’s vast geography would be covered under the process.

Rural small business is critically dependent on accessing information from government departments—state, federal and local—on a range of day-to-day issues required for running that business. They need to pull down information on their statutory requirements, like OH&S, industrial relations and so on. This information invariably involves large files, so the need for fast broadband is critical, as it is for distance education. And do not try and kid me that 3G mobile technology is the way we are going to do it. Once that band is being heavily utilised, you might as well go to Sydney for a visit, see the Royal Easter Show and get back in time for anything to be downloaded.

Accessing suppliers’ catalogues online is a major requirement for many businesses that supply and service agricultural, mining or aircraft equipment and so on. Broadband is now by far the most cost-effective and time-critical method available for urban business, but much of rural Australia looks like missing out on the superior terrestrial broadband technology unless the sort of money that is being quoted is available. I heard the minister earlier today talking about $50 billion being spent in, I think, South Korea. The $600 million now and the interest from the $2 billion plan of the government or Labor’s $4.7 billion upgrade—hoping the privateers will come on board—is just not enough.

Broadband shortfalls are not only in rural and regional Australia; they are right across the regional areas. CENTROC—consisting of 13 councils—have put in for $80 million, which is a big slice of the $600 million set aside by the government under its broadband regional infrastructure fund, which again shows how underfunded this whole process is. The $160 million broadband guarantee is quite laughably underfunded.

Yes, fast broadband is vital for small business. Many of the people who are expecting it will still be sitting around waiting, even under the Labor plan and certainly under the government’s plan. The only band they will know about is the band on their hat—unless, of course, the government or opposition is suggesting user pays. Is that the real future plan of the government? (Time expired)

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