Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

You have got to love the member for Grayndler—he can stick with a message regardless of the facts. Regardless of the reality all around him, he can still keep punching through those messages. He is sticking with this message because he knows the Australian public have been conned. They have been conned by Labor, who went out and campaigned their little tails off on broadband sound bites without any sound public policy to implement what they were talking about.

To get a sense of that, listen to the member for Grayndler. During the election campaign there was promise after promise: fibre to the node, minimum 12 megabyte speeds and 98 per cent coverage. There was even a proposition for a 50-50 equity share, where the government would muscle its way in on the delivery of telecommunications services and then demand a commercial rate for the return. Why would you not just leave it to business to get on with the job? Because Labor needed something that it could hang its shingle off. It did not matter how it got there or what it said in the lead-up to the election, it wanted to make broadband a big issue.

Why? You heard the member for Grayndler talking. He attempted a critique of what the coalition government did. The coalition actually made the term ‘digital economy’ something that mainstream Australians now understand. The coalition actually supported the evolution of technology and recognised that you need to change and adapt to innovation as it becomes available, and as customer services and expectations improve.

Some of the new Labor members might have forgotten that it was the Labor Party running around wanting mandated dial-up speeds. While that was going on the coalition looked to the future and recognised that broadband was the way forward. We have also seen wiggle room on the language—it is now no longer ‘fibre to the node’. Did you hear what the Labor government said? It is now a ‘fibre based network’. Well, hello, we have got that already! The current network is already fibre based. I think there are all bar two exchanges in this vast continent of ours that are not connected by multiple fibre optic connections. We already have a fibre based network. Those cheer squad members of the ALP that just soak up everything the frontbenchers say without even looking at it should look around the capital cities of Australia. If you look around nearly all of the areas that Labor played to, where they hoped to offer higher speed broadband, you will see something called a heat map. That actually shows you what available speeds are there now, in many cases exceeding the 12 megabytes and—not in all cases—already operating on a fibre based network.

This is the reality we have now, and this is one of these remarkable promises made by the Labor Party: they do absolutely sweet nothing in government in relation to broadband and claim an outcome. That is the kind of spivness we see from the Labor Party, where they create this fiction about a problem that is there. They describe and exploit it in an election context, but when they get to government it is a totally new world. It is a bit like creating a new inflation figure. Do you remember the one where they created a new domestic inflation figure—a benchmark that has hardly been used in this country for decades and now Labor hangs on to that? It is a bit like cooking the growth figures to make it look like the economy is not tanking. We have got a new one: the broadband plans.

When the Labor Party said that the coalition had 18 different proposals, no-one really bothered to look at what they really meant. They grab a headline of a strategy and call that one plan, then they say that the elements within that strategy are another plan. They ignore the fact that technology evolves and so do customer expectations of broadband networks. The ultimate irony is that they then hang onto most of what the coalition government did. The minister trots around the country patting himself on the back for clever network initiatives that were actually implemented by the coalition. He was down on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, heralding WiMAX—this wireless technology that he called ‘a dog of a technology’—and taking credit for this dog of a technology that is leading the way in the delivery of reliable, affordable broadband across the globe, particularly in vast areas like our continent, where a mixture of technologies is important.

Labor walks away from its promises and now calls them ‘ambitions’. They are ambitions. They are objectives. They are expectations. No, they are weasel words; they are wriggle room designed to give Labor an opportunity to do a fix—not to deliver what the nation needs, not to do a sober assessment of what would drive our economy forward, not to recognise the opportunities in health service delivery, in education, in e-commerce, in home based businesses, in smart grids—all of the things where a government would describe the performance and the objectives that are being delivered through the technology. No, they have not done that; they have prescribed the technology: 98 per cent fibre to the node. Do you know what that means? It means that, once you get past about 90 per cent of the Australian population, you get into areas where, industry experts tell me, for every one per cent beyond that 90 per cent, it costs a billion dollars.

By being hairy chested and prescribing a technological platform, after trash-talking a wireless technology that is leading innovation, the government is building enormous cost into this project without actually describing why the government needs to be involved in the first place. Governments should get involved when markets fail, when the private sector cannot deliver a reasonable level of service at an affordable price. That is what OPEL was about. That is exactly what OPEL was about—delivering metro comparable broadband to rural, remote and regional Australia. What I am wondering is whether all the people who live in rural, remote and regional Australia who would have benefited from WiMAX are telling their kids who are starting secondary college this year that, rather than having the benefits of high-speed metro comparable broadband to help them with their studies now, they will probably be enjoying schoolies week, finishing their secondary education, before anything is delivered under the Labor Party plan.

That is what is going on in broadband. It is fraud. It is a monumental con. But guess what? The charade will finish and the curtain will open shortly, because the bids need to be delivered tomorrow. And think about the proponents. Imagine their dilemma: a tender document that talks about objectives but does not actually talk about the regulatory environment. Could you imagine in this economic climate going into a bank and saying: ‘Could you lend us $10 billion? We can’t tell you what the competitive environment looks like, what our obligations are to others who might want to access the network, what the universal service obligation might look like or what the price controls might be.’ Imagine going to a bank and saying, ‘Just trust us; give us the $10 billion.’ And when challenged about this what do you get from the minister? He says they are not interested in ‘regulatory totems’. These regulatory reforms are not totems; they are channel markers. They tell proponents where to direct their bids so they do not run aground and make this an extraordinarily expensive con of the Australian public. They let proponents know that we do not want to see upward pressure on the costs of broadband services that some premises, some households, might not want. There are expectations of what those prices might look like for the consumer, because the biggest contest outside the tender bid is the contest for ‘most neglected status’. ‘Most neglected status’ under the NBN is a contest between the national interest and consumer interest, two key objectives that should be part of any government policy, any public policy initiative. But they do not even get a look in, because this is all about electioneering and politicising.

It should not be a surprise. For those who have not had a look at The Latham Diaries, this is its critique of the current communications minister, Stephen Conroy.

Stephen ConroyTold me he doesn’t have any strong policy interests, and maybe he would like the Communications portfolio, which I gave him. It’s a frank admission; machine men aren’t interested in policy, only factions and patronage.

How accurate is that, when you think about the process that has been put in place? This is a process Robert Mugabe would be pleased to call his own. You get a tender document that is so vague that it has no mandated performance requirements. It has a list of objectives, but they are not ranked and there is no statement about the must-haves, the nice-to-haves and the gee-it-would-be-really-good-ifs—none of that, just a great long list. So proponents have no guidance on the regulatory structure; no clear understanding of what the government actually want, because they are walking away from their election commitment; no opportunity to engage in an open debate, because the process has been gagged; and you wonder why across Australia, wall to wall, industry experts are describing this as shambolic.

It is time the Labor government put aside its political interests and its rhetoric and actually focused on the national interest and the interests of consumers, who are very vulnerable in this process—a process that is way overdue and a process that should have seen construction start before the end of this year. Thankfully, the minister has been frank enough to say it is unlikely we will see any work commence before the end of next year. This is fraud. This is a con. (Time expired)

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