Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

During discussion on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009 I have been disappointed at the venom that has been expressed against a truly great Australian company, Telstra. Yes, all of us can find this little incident or that little incident of Telstra perhaps not performing as well as it should have. That happens in every business across this country. But we lose sight of the great work that Telstra has done for our nation.

I want to stand up for Telstra here today in the parliament and give them a pat on the back. In the face of lots and lots of adversity, in the face of very heavy criticism, they have continued to roll out extraordinarily good services—highly professional, highly technical services—for our country. Wherever you go in Australia now it is hard not to be in contact through Telstra’s 3G network. I was recently in Boulia—Boulia is a town of probably 25 houses—and there was Telstra’s Next G network. I was able to connect to the world at Next G speeds.

And so it goes on. Across the country, Telstra is there. Is there anybody else there? Of course nobody else is there. They have not had the interest or the commitment to rural and regional Australia that Telstra has had. In the metropolitan areas, the technology that exists at Telstra’s network control centre in Melbourne, for example, is truly extraordinary. In fact, Telstra has two centres. If one fails there is redundancy to move to another centre. It does not matter which subscriber anywhere in Australia they want to check on at that network control centre, they can do it instantaneously and see the standard of the service and whether it is operating properly or if the people are on the phone or their fax line is being used or their internet is going via a point of presence in Karratha. They are able to tell you all of that information and monitor the services to ensure a high standard of reliability of the services.

Many Australians are shareholders of Telstra. This legislation today attacks those shareholders, the mums and dads who put their faith in a great Australian company. This legislation unashamedly attacks these particular shareholders.

I pay tribute to David Llewellyn, who is the Telstra Country Wide general manager in Townsville, and to his team for the way they help the north of Australia and the fantastic service that they give. I also pay tribute to the many men and women in the two Telstra call centres in Townsville who respond professionally to the queries they receive. It is really terrific to see such great work being done in the north.

Do not misunderstand this piece of legislation. It is a drastic piece of legislation. In fact, in my time in this parliament I have not seen the precedent that this legislation will create if it is passed. It is just another attempt by the Labor government to salvage their disastrous National Broadband Network policy. We have very significant concerns about this legislation and that is why we will speak long and loud on this matter. I hope those people listening to NewsRadio in Townsville on 94.3 megahertz and those watching this parliamentary debate being streamed on the internet will listen carefully to the concerns about this legislation that I and the coalition have—will listen fairly, to understand what it is that concerns us and to make a judgement in their own mind, with an open mind, as to how wrong this legislation is.

Among other things, the bill changes the structure of Telstra by inserting a new part 33 into the Telecommunications Act. If Telstra does not give a voluntary undertaking to the ACCC to structurally separate, it will be made to separate by this legislation. Essentially this legislation is intended to force the break-up of Telstra. This radical decision has come as a surprise to the Australian electorate. Labor made absolutely no mention of any plans to change the structure of Telstra before the last election in 2007. It has no mandate to put this legislation before the parliament.

Australians should listen and understand that, when governments are running very high in the polls, when they have very, very strong support, that is when arrogance sets in. That is when governments propose legislation because they know they can and they know they will get it through irrespective of what Australians think about the sensibleness of the legislation. That is what we are seeing here. We are seeing a government who just arrogantly says, ‘Well, we will put the knife to Telstra.’ That is not a good way to run our country. Any fair-minded person listening to or watching this broadcast will, I think, agree with me.

Let us think of what Labor’s promise was at the last election, 2007. It would spend $4.7 billion upgrading the Telstra network to fibre to the node. What has happened since? That has been entirely discarded and now we are going to see a $43 billion government owned and operated fibre-to-the-node network. This move today is all about the Rudd government—the Labor government—trying to ensure that their National Broadband Network has no competition. We have heard Labor speaker after Labor speaker berating Telstra as a single entity with no competition. Well, hello: here is another entity that the government is setting up that will have no competition. If I had to choose between a private sector enterprise who had to turn a profit and a government organisation run as a bureaucracy and as a single entity with no competition, I would choose the private enterprise operation every time.

This monopoly that the government is setting up has launched an unfair attack on Telstra and its 1.4 million shareholders. The bill and the government’s NBN are intrinsically linked. For this reason, the coalition proposes that this drastic legislation be deferred until a study on the implementation of the National Broadband Network is completed. The broadband policy of the Labor government has been hopeless from the outset. They pushed the original proposal back and back and after failing to secure a tenderer for the original proposal—which by the way cost taxpayers $20 million and dragged on for 18 months; hardly a great commitment from the Labor Party to fixing broadband issues—in April of this year Labor announced a new NBN, NBN mark 2. That is the $43 billion unplanned program—one costed on the back of an envelope—that will see the government own at least a 51 per cent share.

Where have they gone from there? Listen to this: they have created a National Broadband Network company and they are paying the CEO and the board an astonishing $43,000 of taxpayers’ money each week. What does the gallery think of that? That is to run a company that has no customers and provides no services. What a good deal that is for the taxpayer! This is the Labor way.

As a member of the Public Works Committee, I recently saw another example of the Labor way and the arrogance of the Labor Party. The Public Works Committee was presented with a letter from the minister for finance declaring the regional backbone black spots program, a $250 million program, as a program that had to be commenced immediately without the scrutiny of the Public Works Committee. That was rammed through the parliament in the last sitting weeks. They said: ‘We’re going to build this, the parliament is going to have no say in it and we’re not going to have the normal PWC process for expenditure of significant amounts of government money. We’re not going to let them run their eyes over it. We’re just going to do it.’

What are they going to do? Run a fibre in parallel to an existing fibre servicing existing points of presence without building any new fibre anywhere else in Australia. It is kind of like the coaxial cable rollout that we saw in metropolitan cities some years ago, whereby two cables were rolled out in a really inefficient way along the power poles of our metropolitan cities. Why did we need two cables when one cable would have done the job? In Australia, we have the fibre in place and the government, without the scrutiny of the parliament, is running out an exactly parallel fibre network and not providing one extra service to people who currently do not have a fibre service. That is the arrogance of the current government.

I also have concerns that there has been no cost-benefit analysis done for this $43 billion proposal. Understand this: the coalition is not saying that the service should not be provided. Blind Freddy knows that we have to be as technologically advanced as a nation as we can be. It is a question of how it is done. There is a dangerous precedent being created by this piece of legislation, with the government using its legislative power to say to a single company, ‘This is what you will do or else.’ It is legislative blackmail. That is what it is committing in the parliament today; that is what the Labor Party is committing: legislative blackmail.

How would you be if you were BHP and the parliament said, ‘In the nation’s interest, we determine that BHP will no longer be in the business of nickel and we’ll legislate for that’? How do you think you would be if you were the board or the shareholders of BHP with the government telling you how you were going to run your business? That is what we are doing today to Telstra. It is fundamentally wrong. This is socialism at its worst. This is Big Brother telling the private sector how they will run their own businesses. The previous speaker was the member for Blair, a lawyer. We could ultimately see the government going into all legal practices in the country and saying, ‘This is how you’ll run your legal businesses.’ That is untenable, as is what is being done to Telstra.

The $43 billion proposal is certainly a very big risk for Australia without any cost-benefit analysis. In spite of concerns by the Treasury secretary, Ken Henry, who said in September, ‘Government spending that does not pass an appropriately defined cost-benefit test necessarily detracts from Australia’s wellbeing,’ the government is proceeding. In contrast, the coalition had a fully costed and responsible plan for broadband in Australia. Under this plan, effective and affordable broadband services would have been available to Australians across the country. The coalition’s plan would have seen a combination of government and private sector investment and it would all have been completed by the end of this year. Imagine that. At a far lesser cost, it would have been completed by the end of this year. But the Labor government’s hopeless handling of telecommunications means that the risky NBN mark 2 is still not out of the starting blocks.

We saw initially Labor saying that they would cover 98 per cent of the country. Now it is back to 90 per cent. People in my area, those on Magnetic Island, will not get access to NBN mark 2. A suburb of Townsville—Australia’s largest tropical city; the capital of Northern Australia—will not get access to the National Broadband Network mark 2. How can that be?

Labor have consistently bungled their broadband network plan. And, in an attempt to get their plans back on track, they are now introducing this legislation to forcibly break up Telstra. After nearly two years of problems and delays with their broadband network, Labor are launching an attack on a great Australian, Telstra. Their new policy is a clear admission about the failings of the Rudd government’s NBN. Labor have realised that for their current NBN to succeed they must essentially take control of the fixed-line telecommunications network. It is extraordinary. I wonder what is going to happen to our airlines. Are the government going to take control of our airlines because where an airline decides to service or not to service does not suit them? That is the implication of the legislation that is before the parliament today.

The coalition has always been a firm believer in competition. We support the introduction of an effective and affordable broadband network but Labor’s handling of the NBN so far has fulfilled neither of these criteria. There are quite a few areas of this bill which need improvement and amendment. In its present condition it is an unfair and extreme attack on an Australian company and its shareholders. We must await the results of the NBN implementation study to best address this. When the amendments are put to this legislation I will certainly be supporting them.

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