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

There is always one in the crowd, isn’t there. This oversight, deliberate or otherwise, of small communities is unacceptable in every form. Under Labor’s plan, 10 per cent of the population, or 2.2 million Australians, will get the comparatively slower services despite the enormity of the planned spend. So they are spending 10 times what they said they were going to spend during the election campaign, and they still cannot get to 10 per cent of the population—with $43 billion. Such an outcome will, of course, widen the digital divide within Australia. It will disadvantage those people who, because of their businesses or because of their lifestyle choices, have chosen not to live in major capital cities. Every electorate has them. I have them all across my electorate: Bowenville, Quinalow, Maclagan, Nobby, Felton et cetera. They are small townships, old townships, places where generations and generations have grown up—and they will be excluded from this.

The coalition believes government spending of this magnitude of money on broadband, is reckless, irresponsible and unnecessary. Labor’s attack on Telstra and its 1.4 million shareholders is an admission that its new NBN policy cannot be implemented without effectively renationalising the fixed line telecommunications network supported by the migration of Telstra customers. There has been an overwhelming range of criticism of the Rudd government’s plan to split Telstra. It has not been limited to shareholders but extends to union questions. I thought these people were supposed to look after unions. I thought the unions got every one of them into parliament. I thought every one of them was a member of a union. But the unions have been ignored in this as well. The unions have extended concerns and questions about the human cost of the split, and they fear that the forced action will stifle innovation.

Of course there are myriad concerns about the return of big government and government intervention into the market. We all know the Prime Minister wants government to be at the centre of the economy. He is a good, old-fashioned socialist. He said he was a fiscal conservative, then he said he was a social democrat. He is just a socialist. He wants to be in the middle of the economy. He wants to own companies which he can control to go out there and compete against the companies that people have already invested in and put their hard-earned dollars in.

The coalition believes that government funding of broadband should be specifically targeted at underserved areas. The coalition believes in working towards parity between the residents living in cities and those living in rural and regional communities. We do not support the attempts by government to pick winners in a rapidly changing technology sector. We believe in competition as a key driver of service expansion and innovation. It is interesting that this government is pushing an emissions trading scheme which is all about getting competitive outcomes for least dollar costs. Yet they just junk all that when it comes to telecommunications. They say: ‘All that economic rationality and all the privatisation work that Paul Keating and Bob Hawke did is all rubbish. We’ll just forget about all that for now. We’ll bring in something completely different, which is all about government owning and picking winners.’

The coalition is a strong believer that competition is the answer to making sure you get the best return for your buck. We believe that government can use various levers to encourage investment in broadband services and to ensure that service is provided in regional areas. It is also important that a safety net be put in place for those Australians who do not have affordable access to metro equivalent broadband services. We had a fully costed and targeted plan to deliver fast and affordable broadband services across the country, which was rejected by this government when it won the election. That is fine. They can say, ‘Your plan is wrong; our plan is better.’ But to get their plan to work they had to spend 10 times as much money as was required under both their original plan and under our proposal. Labor’s mismanagement of this issue included the cancellation of OPEL in rural and regional networks, which would have started working by now. The reality is that all we have seen from government so far is heavy-handed socialist policy combined with blunders that have cost the taxpayer huge amounts of money.

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