Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It pains me to stand in this House today to talk about this bill, the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009, because of a speech I made in the House on Thursday, 8 September 2005. It was a speech wherein I explained the reasons why I would not be supporting the government that I was part of at that time but would be voting against the sale of Telstra. And I did vote against the sale of Telstra, for the very reasons that I espoused in my speech that day. I said:

What my electorate of Riverina and what most Australians want is a reliable and low-cost communication system that provides equity of access and affordable access. I believe that the simplest way to achieve this would be to retain Telstra’s infrastructure as a public utility and to split off its retail business.

It was clear to me at that time that we were privatising a monopoly. It was my view what we should have been doing what former communications minister Kim Beazley should have done when the former Labor government corporatised Telstra: Telstra should have been structurally separated then. It would have been the right and proper thing to have done then. Now, so many years down the track, the Labor Party understand that this was something that was required.

In that 2005 speech I gave the reasons for my view that we should structurally separate Telstra’s retail and wholesale infrastructure. Sad to say—and I wish it were not true—everything that I outlined in my speech came true for the people of the Riverina. I am not sure how privatisation worked for people in the city but I can most certainly say that for the people in the country it was not the best decision that the former government made.

Unfortunately, selling Telstra then became part of Labor policy. They agreed that Telstra should be sold and that it should not be structurally separated—as they had with corporatisation back when Kim Beazley was minister for communications. As recently as May 2009, the former Labor minister said that he had never advocated structural separation of the company.

In this debate we are being asked to support something although we know very little about its outcomes and what it actually envisages for rural and regional Australia. People might think that I would be a natural supporter of this piece of legislation, but in fact the horse has bolted. The gate is open, the horse has bolted and it is very difficult to put the horse back in the paddock in the same state that it was. That is why I stand here to raise my significant concerns about what we are facing.

The fact is we are being asked to support a bill that seeks to prevent Telstra from acquiring specified brands of spectrum which could be used for advanced wireless broadband services unless it structurally separates and divests itself of its hybrid fibre-coaxial cable network and its interest in Foxtel. We are also being asked to support the changes to the USO and the customer service guarantee, the CSG, without understanding exactly what those changes will deliver to regional people. That is not surprising, because this government has spent not one dollar on communications in my electorate since its election in 2007. But I am expected to accept the government has only good intentions where regional people are concerned.

What we have in fact is a series of policy blunders over the two years that this government has been in power. The government promised a $4 billion broadband rollout that was supposed to be up and running, I think, by last December. That was shelved. The OPEL model was shelved because it was not good enough. There was some sort of wireless performance issue and, for the ADSL2 exchange upgrades, wireless was not good enough. Then the government proposal was for a $4.7 billion rollout of a wonderful communications network that was going to reach 98 per cent of the population! That was their election promise. That was shelved, and then it was replaced. They said: ‘We’re going to give you another broadband scheme now. The $4.7 billion that we anticipated would get to 98 per cent of the population, which was our election promise to you, is now a $43 billion program that is going to reach 90 per cent of the population.’

Now we have a $25 million implementation study for the government’s proposed NBN. It is due in February. They say to me, as a representative of regional people, ‘Trust me; I will still love you tomorrow.’ I do not have any faith in these promises. Everyone in this House talks about broadband. Everyone says that we are talking about fast and reliable broadband services, state-of-the-art communications et cetera. These things do not get dropped out of midair. They do not just get dropped into place and happen as soon as we decide it is going to happen.

Who looks after the many people that I, Labor Party members and other members on this side of the House represent who are still on pair gains and RIMs? Competitors are coming through my office saying: ‘Now have we got a deal for you for regional Australia. We have not come to you before because you do not have the critical mass and there is not enough money in it for us to deliver services to you. We are interested in you now; we were not interested in you until all of this came about.’ They left us swinging on the end of the branch, with the bough ready to break. They have never been too interested in providing us with services, but now they have a deal for us.

I asked about all of the people who are now reliant on copper wire and who will continue to be reliant on copper wire for a very long time, regardless of what happens with the proposed NBN $43 billion plan. As I said, it will not get dropped out of midair. I have seen quotes in newspapers that say it will take from eight years to 18 years to roll out. Who will look after the people on copper wire? Who will look after the people with the pair gains and RIMs? What are these competitors going to do when they come in? Are they going to replace the pair gains? Are they going to build the infrastructure to replace the RIMs systems? No, they are not. They do not want to enter into those areas either. They have told me clearly that they would require subsidisation to do that, and I have no evidence in front of me in this bill of any intent to subsidise the people in the Riverina that I represent who are living on pair gains and RIMs and have inadequate services already.

I am not talking about in every gum tree in Australia and I am not talking about in communities of 50 or 100 people; I am talking about communities of 60,000 people and 30,000 people. They are in subdivisions where they are on pair gains and RIMs. You cannot deliver the technology that we are being promised. It is going to be some time till we have fibre optics running through our communities to every house. If we force this separation on Telstra, why should Telstra uphold, maintain and keep this system running and operational? Who is going to look after the people who have no other choices?

When government members from regional communities tell us what great competition this is going to lead to and what lower prices this will lead to they conveniently forget all of these points. In reality, this will be a long way away for those people because it takes such a long time to build these networks. I have been hearing rubbish on broadband speed and the rollout. It just simply is not the reality. There has to be a reality check and understanding here as to what is actually going to happen and who is going to be responsible.

In the past I have been in the position of having to vote against my own government—and it was not pleasant for me to do so—because it was something that I felt strongly about. I am sure I will never see the day when a Labor member walks across the floor and votes against their government. I can guarantee you that; I am sure of that. This legislation that has been presented in this House has so much rubbish and rhetoric attached to it. There are no real clear guidelines and understanding as to how it will work in reality and who is going to look after the people who do not get a service dropped from the sky in a short amount of time. Who is going to look after them, and why should they?

Where are the safeguards? Where are the safety nets? Where are the guarantees? What is going to happen with the CSO? What is going to happen with the USO? We know that there will be changes to the USO in this legislation. We know that there will be changes to the CSO. How can we be confident that the regional people will be looked after? We have seen the $2.4 billion rural Communications Fund disbanded and taken away by this Labor government. That was put in place to continue to upgrade services and maintain the adequacy of regional services. That money was to be invested in continually building those services. In the flick of an eye the Labor Party came in and took it away. It was absorbed into their city-centric process. I feel that regional Australia has been continually sold out.

It is my view that we should sit down and clearly assess how this new model for telecommunications in Australia will deliver quality services and technology to regional Australians. What will be the time frame for that to be delivered? Who is going to ensure the continuation of the maintenance and upgrades of services until the system is rolled out? How much money is going to be given to the companies and to the providers to ensure that this is being done? Telstra are the monopoly provider; there is no doubt about it. I am not here advocating on behalf of Telstra. I am here advocating on behalf of the people who are absolutely reliant on Telstra. Can I tell you this? They will continue to be reliant on Telstra because there will be no new group of people rushing into the electorate in the Riverina that I represent to offer these services. They will want to wait until it is all there for them so they will not have to make big-dollar investments. The critical mass is not there. The return to their shareholders will simply not be there; it is not in their best interests. We will not have the high returns of the critical mass that you might have in Sydney, Newcastle or Wollongong. They just will not be there.

Even now, with the NBN, none of the communities with populations under 1,000 are covered—and this is a $43 billion program. We have gone from the Labor promise of 98 per cent of Australians being covered for under $4.7 billion—and they promised state-of-the-art, high-tech delivery—to a cost of $43 billion to cover 90 per cent of Australians. I simply cannot figure that. Are we supposed to let them say: ‘Trust us. We know what we’re doing’? Sincerely, that is a very big ask on anyone’s part. Any attempt to abolish the universal service obligation legislation and put into the minister’s hands the responsibility for determining what should or should not be in the USO should be opposed. I just do not think that would be a sensible outcome.

I have been told by various people who have come through my office that the ACCC powers will be strengthened in our best interests. For goodness sake. I said this in my speech on 8 September in 2005: the ACCC will be the group of people looking to ensure accountability in services. That is what the former government did. They said, ‘Well, the ACCC is going to be given more power and services to make sure all of this happens.’ The fact is that the ACCC was a toothless tiger. It could not do anything when Telstra was government owned, so I do not know how it will do anything now that it is privately owned. We could not make Telstra accountable then, when it was majority government owned. I said in my speech that I just could not understand how the ACCC was going to do anything about the monopoly pricing that the sale of Telstra was going to lead to. The people I represented were totally reliant on Telstra giving them the services. True to form, the ACCC has done absolutely nothing.

Now we say that it is a bit like GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch, that we are going to give the ACCC all these powers. We are going to put in a fuel commissioner and he is going to have all these powers. I still see the same discrepancy in prices for fuel in my electorate compared with other areas. You get the ACCC in to do an investigation and they say, ‘Oh, well, we really can’t do anything about it; we don’t have the powers.’ Yet we are supposed to believe that Graeme Samuel and the ACCC are going to look after our interests after this major plan supposedly succeeds. I have been too long burnt by the promise of riches to come. I have had the most enormous disillusionment about promises about the riches to come to regional Australia. It seems to me that every time somebody wants to do something, they all decide to make an industry of regional Australia. They say, ‘Have we got a deal for you.’ This Labor government is a classic at it. It is no different from anybody else. It speaks with a forked tongue. There is no commitment to regional Australia and that is proven by the very fact that we are simply non-existent outside of dispatch box rhetoric. They say, ‘Oh, this is going to be good for regional Australia.’ They say that as if that is the seal of the deal.

I have said that Labor has already stolen our $2.4 billion from the Communications Fund. It was our guarantee that we would have quality services provided to regional areas. We have a major issue to confront here. In essence, as I stand here, it is extraordinary that we are saying two years later, ‘We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with communications but trust us; we will deliver to you.’ That is not good enough. It is not good enough for regional Australia. I have no intention of being wooed by any false promises in the interests of the electorate of Riverina. I have not been wooed in the past; I certainly will not be wooed right now. It would be a mistake, an absolute mistake, if this bill were allowed to pass in the House without the proper scrutiny that it needs for the benefit of regional people.

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