Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting to note that the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009 is so important to the member for Dawson that he spoke for barely six minutes on it. It is a bill that will affect virtually every constituent in his electorate who relies at the moment on ensuring that they are dealt with equitably by the telecommunication service providers. The reality is that as he drives across his electorate, as he mentioned, the chances are that he will be using Telstra. The chances are that in the majority of his electorate—not the majority of his population but the majority of his electorate—the only reliable broadband service, mobile phone service and aircard service for his laptop will come from Telstra. Yet we see here a bill which will not only put at risk the level of service in regional and low-populated areas but also damage the hip pockets of every Telstra shareholder in his electorate. There seems to be scant concern for those people.

In rising to speak on the bill, I express the shared concerns of many members on this side of the House who see the deep flaws within this legislation and are mindful of the destructive consequences those flaws will have on Australians and on the Australian telecommunication network. I am no fan of Telstra, but I have to acknowledge that they are the only telecommunications company that has done the job for regional and rural people. They are the only telecommunications company that can provide me with reliable service within my electorate and across the vast inland of Australia, where I travel as the shadow minister for industry and resources.

In recent weeks, much of my time has been dedicated to addressing the most glaring problems of the government’s rushed and reckless CPRS legislation. Unfortunately, the telecommunications legislation we have to deal with now is just another example of rushed and reckless legislation where the Rudd government shows scant regard for the fact that its actions will impact adversely on all Australians. As earlier speakers have indicated, the coalition has strong reservations about several features of this bill—in particular, its provision to hold a gun to the head of Telstra and demand that that company undergo a structural separation. Has the government seriously examined the consequences of that, particularly for regional Australia? Who is making the big investments in regional Australia to ensure the continuation of Next G telecommunications? They provide the voice access on our BlackBerries, the data access on our BlackBerries and of course the data access on our Telstra aircards—were the Department of Parliamentary Services to give us one—which many members have been forced to buy privately to ensure we have access through our laptops while we are travelling in areas outside large capital cities, and sometimes within large capital cities, so much is the difference in the service provided between those data services.

If this bill goes through and Telstra is cut down the middle, I fear that it will do what the other companies have done and simply become a cherry-picking operation where the density of population rewards the level of investment. On that basis, people in regional Australia will miss out. What we have already seen is that there are still difficulties in delivering broadband services to small communities in regional areas which will not be addressed by this legislation. They will not be addressed. I cite one example, and I will be coming back to it later. At the Quinalow State School, which has been in receipt of computers from the government, those computers are still not operating, simply because there is not a broadband link to the main spine that runs down the highway. So schoolchildren at the Quinalow school are missing out. They will miss out again under this legislation because Quinalow is a town of fewer than a thousand people.

That is the practical impact of this, but, as I said, there is also a concern shared by millions of investors—everyday mums and dads, individual Australians, women and men, who have put their hard-earned cash into a company which they expect to be able to operate in a commercial way. They are the shareholders and customers of Telstra. This latest destructive development from a government that has so comprehensively bungled its handling of Australia’s transitional broadband services highlights its lack of understanding of the detail and time it takes to develop these proposals properly. It is in the most reprehensible manner that the government is sacrificing the best interests of Telstra, Telstra shareholders and Telstra customers so that it can frantically try and paper over the cracks in its crumbling national broadband strategy.

The coalition has flagged several concerns with Labor’s NBN mark 2 proposal, the most significant of which is: it renationalises our fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure. Wind the clock back 15 years or, say, 20 years to when the person who sat in the seat on the other side of this table was Bob Hawke and the person who sat behind him was Paul Keating. They understood the risks of government ownership of public infrastructure that could be commercialised. When they started that privatisation, we supported them because the people who do business best are businesses, not governments. Yet here we have a massive renationalisation of what should be a commercial solution.

Here we have a government who, faced with the prospect of what they are proposing—which they basically just plucked out of the air—not being commercial, have said: ‘Oh, we’ll just build it anyway. We’ll just borrow the money and build it anyway. It’ll never be commercial, it’ll never be used properly, it decimates the largest telecommunications company in Australia, but we don’t care about that. We have a policy—our first one didn’t work. With mark 2, we’re going to renationalise fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure.’ And doing so, as I say, exposes taxpayers to all the risks of running a telecommunications business. There is no proposal, no prospectus, no analysis of the numbers. Just take the taxpayers’ money and, when there is not enough of that, borrow some more, put it on the tab, get the taxpayers to underwrite it and off you go. This will involve massive borrowings which, like the Rudd government’s cash splash, must be underwritten by the taxpayer.

Despite the government’s claims that this legislation will privatise the network five years after it has been built, it is likely that that will not happen. The legislation says it will be privatised, but in fact it is likely that the taxpayers will be saddled with financial responsibility for the network well beyond the government’s pledged time frame. Who is going to buy this? And where is the analysis; where is the prospectus? Where are the people queueing up to be part of this?

The coalition has always supported the ongoing development of broadband services and recognises the significance of universal access to fast, reliable and affordable broadband. It is no longer a luxury. Every household should have access to fast broadband. In contrast to Labor’s policy, the coalition takes a practical and realistic approach to ensuring Australians can have access to broadband without taxpayers being saddled with a massive debt.

Over the last two years, Labor has squandered the opportunity to develop a national broadband network, due to its own incompetence. After running a failed tender for its NBN mark 1 proposal, which wasted 18 months and $20 million, in April 2009 Labor announced that it had abandoned its 2007 election commitment and would commence a new process in a bid to deliver NBN mark 2—at a hugely inflated cost to the taxpayer, of course. To mask the collapse of its original NBN plan, Labor has made an extravagant promise to spend up to $43 billion—$43 billion. Even with all the money that is being splashed about at the moment, that is still a huge number. In fact, I dare say there are few people in Australia who could actually comprehend the size of that, even if you tried to stack $100 bills on top of each other. The government is going to spend $43 billion to construct a fibre-to-the-premise network through the establishment of a government business enterprise in which the government owns a minimum 51 per cent.

Labor’s proposal to spend up to $43 billion of taxpayers’ funds has been committed without any detailed cost-benefit analysis or any semblance of a business plan or prospectus. The government has made that promise despite a failure to conduct the work that needs to be done. It has not done the business analysis, it has not done the cost-benefit analysis and it has not done the economic modelling. The government does not even know whether this new broadband company can be commercially viable. I would have thought that would have been the first issue to be covered. This proposal has every appearance of being a stunt cobbled together to mask Labor’s failure to deliver on its original election promise and to get it through to the next election.

Telstra shareholders, employers and customers should not be forced to mop up this government’s mess or compensate the government for its inability to deliver its election commitment of a national broadband network for a cost of around a 10th of this proposal—$4.7 billion. That was the promise they took to the election. We are now looking at $43 billion and rising.

And Labor said nothing at all in the 2007 election campaign about breaking up Telstra, just as it said nothing at all—in fact, the contrary—in regard to private health insurance during the election. Again, this is something that it has pulled out of nowhere that has surprised not only Telstra but also of course the investors, including the mums and dads who have put their money in Telstra shares. This new and radical Labor policy is the ultimate consequence of the debacle that Labor has produced on broadband. Many leading analysts predict that this project will be not only not commercially viable, as Labor claims it will be, but also extraordinarily difficult to put in place.

Labor’s proposal also confirmed that towns of under 1,000 people will not receive the high-speed 100 megabits per second services but services at around a 10th of the speed delivered by wireless or satellite. Herein lies an issue on which the member for Dawson should be standing up for his constituency. He has got small towns in his electorate. I know he has: I have visited them; I have been there. What is he going to say to them? ‘Oh, sorry; if you live in Mackay, that’s fine, but if you don’t you don’t get much’? Is that any way for a government to treat its constituency or for the member for Dawson to treat his constituency? Apparently so.

Apparently there is no need to look after people who live in small towns. I grew up near a small town. I was school captain because I was the only person in grade 7. They did not have a big choice. Small communities are just as important as big communities.

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