Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 following the member for Braddon. I am sure we all look forward to the day when the member for Braddon can skype, and it will be an enjoyable experience I am sure for his family to have him dialling in each night and having his face over their computer screen. It is interesting to follow a member from a Tasmanian electorate, given that the whole farce of the government’s plan is being unravelled in Tasmania. It is interesting to note that, had the government continued with the OPEL program and not broken the contract as it did, by the end of this year the Braddon electorate would have had 13 new WiMAX base stations, would have had five exchanges, expanded to cell II-plus and would have been delivering faster speeds. Instead, we have this opportunity for a hard hat for the member for Braddon, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to have their photos taken but not to have any actual services delivered.

But let us not let the spin get in the way of the substance, which highlights the biggest issue with the NBN mark 1 or 2 or 3 or 4, whichever one is to come. It highlights the approach of this government like no other issue, and that is the approach of spin over substance, the photo opportunity and the announcement over the detail. We saw in April this year the second mark of the National Broadband Network announcement, which was the new plan to spend, as I understood, 51 per cent of the potential value of the NBN—although the member for Braddon has just said that the government will spend up to $43 billion, which appears to be the total cost indicated in the back-of-the envelope calculation. So confusion reigns over on that side of the place on the economics of this plan. No business plan has been released. It is a $43 billion network without a business plan. There are no investors and there has been no information to market. If they were a company they would be locked up it is that badly planned and that badly thought through. But it does highlight like no other issue the spin-over-substance approach of this Prime Minister and this government. It is the New South Wales government’s way of doing business—the New South Wales Labor Party’s way of doing business—and we have seen the results in the state of New South Wales and what is happening there today with people like Senator Arbib from New South Wales and the minister for consumer affairs inflicting on the Australian public what they have done to that state.

This issue is a good example of that. We had during the last election campaign in April 2007 the NBN mark 1 announcement, which was that we would have a $4.7 billion spend for a fibre-to-the-node network of up to 12 megs per second. That promise, of course, was never deliverable to 98 per cent of the country. However, it was a good election promise; it was a nice pie-in-the-sky optic. Everyone thought that would be a nice thing for everyone to have—it sounded like it was new and fashionable, which fitted with the Kevin 07 mantra—but the problem was that it was never deliverable. So Labor get into government and they do a study. I think they spent about $50 million at looking at whether they could do it. There was great fanfare and it was all meant to be rolled out by the next year, from memory.

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