Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

The stated purpose of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Protecting Services for Rural and Regional Australia into the Future) Bill 2007 is to amend the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act to protect the $2 billion Communications Fund. The real purpose of this bill—and we have just heard it from the member for O’Connor—is that the government wants to try and have a crack at Labor’s plans to use the Communications Fund to build a national broadband network. I say to the government: thank you for the opportunity to show, once and for all, that it is Labor that has the plan to build and deliver high-speed broadband to this country, that it is Labor that believes it is the responsibility of governments to nation build, that it is Labor that understands that investing in broadband is one of the most important infrastructure investments we can make towards ensuring future economic growth. The government wants to lock the Communications Fund away so that it is only the income or interest earned on the investments of the fund that are available to implement recommendations proposed by the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee. Despite the bill’s title, the bill will not protect regional and rural services, nor will it improve across the board the woeful broadband services we have currently. In fact, what this bill does is condemn regional and rural Australia to a second-class broadband future.

The story of the Howard government when it comes to broadband really is a case study of what you should not do. This bill is the 19th time the government has tried to fix up regional and rural services. The problem is that the Howard government has an outdated view of the needs of regional and rural communities, particulary of their broadband needs. The fact is painfully underlined by the Howard government’s announcement of the roll-out of a wireless network for regional and rural communities, the shortsightedness of which I will discuss later.

Coming from a regional electorate, I know firsthand that the standard of telecommunications in regional and rural areas is of great concern. People and businesses alike have had to endure a second-rate service when it comes to high-speed broadband—in fact, calling it second-rate is to give it a compliment. In my electorate, the furthest town of which is only an hour and a half from Melbourne—hardly remote; hardly at times even rural—the problems we have with accessing ADSL, let alone anything faster, would lead you to think we are in a Third World country. This has serious implications for our ability to compete not just globally, which is what many companies in my district do, but even within our own state. I know the line the government will take on this bill; they are going to claim that by investing the interest of the $2 billion Communications Fund into regional and rural Australia they will fix our broadband problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. It only highlights how little the government actually understand the problem. The income and interest earned by the Communications Fund is nowhere near enough revenue to raise the standard of telecommunications services in regional, rural and remote parts of Australia. It is a drop in the ocean of what is needed and what investment is needed to build a national fibre-optic network. It really is the case of far too little and it will be far too late.

Australia’s broadband performance is poor; we are ranked only 16th out of 30 countries surveyed by OECD. It will take more than the interest payments from the Communications Fund to bring regional and rural Australia up to speed with metropolitan centres, let alone the rest of the world. It will take more than the government’s fraudulent Optus-Elders wireless plan to improve broadband services in this country.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, governments laid out railway networks as the arteries of the country. In the 21st century, governments around the world are ensuring that high-speed broadband networks are laid out as the arteries of the new economy. After 11 years of the Howard government, we have nothing more than a patchwork network which lags behind those of most developed countries. As is the case with most areas, regional and rural communities are doing it the toughest. Fifteen per cent fewer people in regional Victoria have broadband access than in metropolitan areas. It shows there are still more than 55,000 Victorians who want metropolitan-equivalent broadband coverage but who cannot access it, up nine per cent since 2005.

Broadband services in Australian cities are second rate by world standards. In Australia, broadband is defined by access speeds equal to or greater than 256 kilobits per second. In other countries, the service is not even considered to be broadband unless it provides minimum speeds in the megabits or 1,000 kilobits range. In Hong Kong, the slowest broadband speed is 1.5 megabits per second. In Australia less than half of households have access to broadband speeds in excess of two megabits per second, whereas in the UK, Sweden, France, Italy, Canada and the USA 80 to 90 per cent of households have access to faster broadband.

For 11 years regional Australia has had to endure broadband speeds that are slower than those of our metropolitan centres. That is not a matter for debate but a matter of fact. The Howard government’s latest broadband plan has effectively locked regional communities into a second-class future by cementing a two-tiered system across the nation. The Prime Minister’s solution to the broadband problem in regional communities is to roll out a wireless network. That is not the solution; it is a fix to try and get broadband off the agenda before the election.

I recall that in question time the Prime Minister held up a map of my electorate—a map of the communities that, he claimed, would be able to access faster internet speeds. Having had time to study that map in some detail and consult with telecommunications experts, I can say that the map held up by the Prime Minister in question time, the whiz-bang broadband plan for the electorate of Ballarat, is a complete and utter sham. The Prime Minister stated that the map showed five areas in the electorate of Ballarat that were going to get the benefit of ADSL2+. The first problem is that only three of the communities identified on the map that were going to be able to access ADSL2+ are actually in the electorate of Ballarat; the other two are in other electorates entirely. Of the three that were going to have access to ADSL2+, two of those already have ADSL2+ and will notice very little difference in their broadband speeds.

I do not know who put the map together but I am pretty sure that the children at Bacchus Marsh Primary School or Bacchus Marsh preschool could have done a better job of drawing one up. They would have at least known to put Bacchus Marsh on the map in the first place. Bacchus Marsh is a pretty large community and to leave it off the map was an astounding omission. They would also know that condemning a town the size of Bacchus Marsh, only 35 minutes from metropolitan Melbourne, to wireless is simply a dumb idea.

The map was also supposed to show which communities would be able to access wireless. When I observed the map, I saw that many communities that have been crying out for faster internet speeds could supposedly access a wireless network. ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘I will have a look at that.’ The problem is that the map is entirely wrong. Communities such as Yandoit, Shepherds Flat, Mount Rowsley and Blackwood will not be able to access the wireless network, despite the claims on the Howard government map.

When devising the map, the Howard government did not take into account the topography of the area—the variations in vegetation, buildings, rain et cetera that will prevent significant numbers of people in my district receiving broadband services under the Howard government’s plan. The wireless network is a line-of-sight technology, which means that, if you cannot see the transmitting tower, you cannot access the network. The problem is that regional and rural Australia is not flat: it is blessed with vast numbers of valleys, hills and, occasionally, mountains which cut off many communities from accessing the network.

The data delivered using a WiMAX solution is shared between multiple users. Rather than delivering a minimum 12 megabits per second to customers, the Howard government will deliver up to 12 megabits per second, shared between multiple customers. Broadband speeds are more likely to be 512 kilobits per second. It really is ‘fraudband’.

The government maps that depict the OPEL coverage are misleading and they now come with two pages of disclaimers, disclaimers the Prime Minister did not even mention when he was in here in question time holding up the map for Ballarat. The disclaimers state that depictions of WiMAX and other wireless coverage on these maps do not take into account local topographical features, a disclaimer that John Howard did not see fit to bring up in question time.

The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts has admitted that the maps only provide indicative coverage and that exact coverage maps would be available once the network was operational. That is a bit too late if you have decided that, because of the map, you will be able to get WiMAX—and then you find that you cannot. Industry experts suggest that WiMAX coverage from a base station is more like five to 10 kilometres. This is ignoring power limitation issues and is certainly nowhere near the 20 kilometres that the government has claimed.

If you thought that this cobbled-together policy could become any shabbier, then think again. The Howard government’s broadband plan does not have its own spectrum to broadcast. Instead, spectrum must be shared, which leads to a number of issues. For example, power limitations apply to the shared spectrum, limitations which will severely limit overall transmission distance. Because use of the shared spectrum in WiMAX deployments is atypical, Australians will require customised computer chip sets in order to access bandwidth, delivered over a shared spectrum. In addition, the WiMAX service offered by the Howard government may suffer from interference, due to the fact that other household appliances, such as your garage door opener, share the same spectrum, as do cordless phones and microwaves.

It did not take long for businesses and constituents and local experts from my electorate to contact me, outraged at the government’s political fix. I was emailed by one of my constituents some time ago, and I want to read out quite a bit of his email as it illustrates the depth of the government’s failure to understand just why regional and rural communities need fibre to the node, not WiMAX. Now while Ian is a very sophisticated internet user, with technologies such as voice over IP increasingly being used it will not be long before people realise how woeful their system is.

Ian assists in a global network of volunteers who develop the Ubuntu Linux system, quite a complex system. There are lots of people who describe themselves as IT geeks right across the country all the way from small rural communities to metropolitan areas. They get onto this network and are part of the system of building Ubuntu Linux, a system that is used by many large-scale online businesses. The problem for Ian is that he lives in a small community which is not too far from Melbourne, some 45 minutes away, and he is only able to get ISDN. Currently he is on a 128-kilobit ISDN home service, which is the best he can do via copper. He says in his email:

Downloading one 650 megabit CD image takes me about 11½ hours. The 1,599 megabit version upgrade is going to take nearly 30 hours and one DVD, if you could be bothered to attempt it, would take about 3½ days of continuous downloading.

He usually starts his CD downloading in the evening before he goes to bed and leaves it running overnight to have it finished sometime next morning. These are theoretical maximum times because it can depend on whether there are interruptions and whether the full speed on the line is available for the entire period.

While he says that 11½ hours is a long time, he is very fortunate to be on an unlimited data ISDN internet plan, so there is no additional cost other than the long time it takes to complete a download. Currently Ian pays $46.40 per month for his internet access through Telstra BigPond. On the other hand, if he were to take up the government’s program, which is to get satellite broadband into his area, he would be paying $300 per month. It is not a matter of just saying that there are other technologies available; it is also the cost of those technologies that is the problem, and that is not something that the government has taken into account. As Ian says:

As you will appreciate, any of these outcomes are financially unviable for a home user and are significantly more than the $46.40. I am therefore better off remaining on a narrowband but unlimited download ISDN internet plan than being lured to a broadband plan by conditional promises of faster connection.

He goes on to say specifically:

Only when our bandwidth issues are seriously addressed, such as through fibre to the node or fibre to the home—core infrastructure development schemes—will the internet move from being seen as a first-generation option to being embedded in society as a mature fundamental communications medium. I am sure that history recorded a similar sequence of progress in the introduction of the telephone 130 years ago. It went from being a scientific curiosity to being a luxury item that only the very rich could afford to being a commercially exploitable mass communication option and finally to being embedded in society as fundamental and essential infrastructure. Television has also followed a similar path since the 1950s. The faster the internet also reaches that final stage the better.

I could not agree more with Ian.

George Fong, a local IT expert, in response to the Prime Minister’s plan for condemning regional Australia to a wireless future, said:

Australia lacks a big-picture strategy and without that seems doomed to continue with a litany of short-term solutions that ultimately will leave the country’s telecommunications languishing behind the rest of the world.

I could not have said it better myself. For George Fong, the only future to pursue is one that invests in fibre-to-the-node technology. In fact one of his and my major concerns with the direction of the Howard government’s proposal is that it will delay rather than enhance the kinds of broadband services in regional and rural areas.

If you look across the globe, all developed countries have or are rolling out fibre-to-the-node networks. If regional Australia is going to stay competitive we have to go down the fibre path. There is no choice about that. Local businesses within the IT sector have already told me that companies will not locate to regional areas because they cannot access fast enough broadband. If regional and rural communities are to remain competitive, they will have to have access to fibre to the node. A failure to do this would have catastrophic effects on regional communities. So why not start now? Why wait? Why delay the inevitable?

The answer is that there is an election only weeks away and the government needed a short-term political fix instead of what is needed in the long-term interests of regional Australia. The Howard government is keen to point out that the wireless network will be available before Labor’s fibre to the node. But, if you look at it in terms of what you do in your own household, you would not spend $10,000 on building an extension to a house—because you could get it up quickly—knowing that in a couple of years you are going to knock down the whole building to build something better. You can apply the same logic to the Howard government’s wireless network. What is the point of investing $1 billion of taxpayers’ money on something that will be well past its use-by date in less than two years?

Compare this to Labor’s broadband policy. Once a fibre network is rolled out it will make sure regional and rural areas have access to a first-class broadband network for the next 50 years. The Victorian Department of Infrastructure’s economic modelling shows that, by 2015, an IT industry with 21st-century broadband has the potential to add $15 billion to Victoria’s gross state product and create 153,000 new jobs. Let us not put regional communities further behind the roll-out. Under the Howard government’s plan, metropolitan areas and other countries will move further ahead. Their economies will grow while regional and rural communities are strangled both economically and socially by a second-rate service.

The internet is not something that only people in the cities use. People and businesses in regional and rural Australia use the internet and they use it in more and more sophisticated ways. They do not just use it, as we saw in the case of Ian, to send emails every now and again. They use it in more innovative and sophisticated ways than we could have imagined even a year ago. Again, I want to quote from Ian to explain why it is so important for rural and regional communities. He says:

Professionals in any industry sector who want to work online from home will sooner or later face a similar issue to me. For obvious lifestyle reasons, some of these people want to live in rural or rural fringe areas such as Greendale. Being within an hour of the Melbourne CBD, this area is arguably metropolitan fringe. However, in terms of internet access, we are treated the same as someone living in a dugout in Tibooburra.

Not that that is a bad thing to do. He continues:

That aside—though a key feature of the internet is that it breaks down physical barriers, and a person working in cyberspace who happens to physically be in Creswick needs to be on the same level of access as a person working in the same cyberspace who happens to be in Carlton or Coober Pedy or Tennant Creek or Paris or Baghdad or Denpasar, for that matter—if rural people do not have the same access pipeline into cyberspace as those in the suburbs, the internet carries with it similar limitations to their physical location. One could even argue that the most remote and isolated locations in Australia should really get high-speed broadband internet access first, to offset the ‘tyranny of distance’ issues that those in cities and less remote areas don’t have to contend with. I think most home users of the internet aren’t even aware of the potential that the internet holds once high-volume data streams come into play. A lot of people only use the internet for email and to surf web pages. Those use cases can easily be serviced by dial-up connection, and barely scratch the surface. The computer and the network connection are sitting idle 99 per cent of the time in this usage pattern. When voice over IP telephony, videoconferencing and multimedia streaming start becoming seriously mainstream, which isn’t too far away now, then the limitations of the infrastructure will start to become more apparent to the user community.

Labor have a plan to invest $4.7 billion in our broadband infrastructure. Labor’s plan does not discriminate between taxpayers living in urban, suburban, regional and rural areas. The $4.7 billion Labor plan is to build a national broadband network. Labor’s plan is for a state-of-the-art fibre-to-the-node network that has speeds of 12 megabits per second, capable of upscaling, to be laid out over a five-year period. The Howard government has already spent $5 billion of taxpayers’ money on 17 broadband proposals, none of which have delivered true broadband capabilities. Labor’s national broadband network is the sort of nation building that this country needs, and the sort of nation building that only a Labor government will deliver.

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