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

It is a great honour to follow the member for Lindsay. I respect his authority on these subjects and I know that, in the past, he has focused very much on these issues. He has a great understanding and depth of knowledge about this and it is a great opportunity to follow him in this debate. I appreciate the fact that he has put his point of view to the parliament and it is a point of view that I largely disagree with.

I support very much the second reading amendment, moved to put off the debate of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009 until we have the results of the implementation study into the NBN mark 2. I think it is mark 2 we are at. I am sure there will be mark 3, 4, 5 and maybe 6 to come, but it would make a lot of sense to wait for that study to be done, given the government has put a significant amount of effort into the study. It is a confused position we are in because we heard again today in question time that the whole concept of a business plan, for the ‘small’ figure of $42 billion, has not yet been put together, which is quite extraordinary I would have thought. The member at the table, Mr Gray, in his previous role in a very large multinational company would not have been able to get away with that. Nonetheless, we will continue.

What this is about is the government’s complete and utter inability to get Telstra to play ball with them on their National Broadband Network. That is exactly what this bill is about. It is the sword over the neck of Telstra by using the availability of the next-generation spectrum, which Telstra will be very keen to participate in the auction of when this minister turns off the analog signal for TVs in a couple of years time.

We know from international examples that the sale of the spectrum will yield extraordinary amounts of money. There is a very good reason for that. It is because it is in a very high quality spectrum and it will allow Telstra, if Telstra are successful in bidding for it—you would think they would be very keen to at least get part of that—to expand their very capable Next G network, which is already delivering very good speeds.

I am sure many members in this place who use their Blackberries around the country—I am sure most now have Blackberries—are taken by just how quick the speeds are. There is a good reason for that—it is because Telstra have invested a lot of money in their Next G network, which delivers very good service. That is the truth of it. I know my electorate still has black spots or occasional dropouts because of the topography of the Adelaide Hills and the Fleurieu Peninsula, but the speed of delivery is actually very good. Telstra will want access to the additional spectrum because it will allow them to ramp up those services, which questions the very need for the fixed line service that the government is running around bragging about, saying how important it will be.

My electorate of Mayo—which is 20 kilometres in parts and 30 kilometres in other parts stretching far out from the city of Adelaide, which is a lot closer to a major city than some of the members’ electorates in this place—will not get this NBN under any circumstances. I know Senator Minchin, our opposition spokesman on this, and who is doing a very good job, has highlighted the point that towns with a population under 1,000 people will miss out on the NBN and will be given a second-rate service. I contest that it will be lot more than that. I contest that all of my electorate will miss out on this because it will just not be economically viable, and we have not seen any evidence to the contrary thus far.

The reason we are debating this bill today is that the government made a promise before the last election that it could never keep. It made a promise because it fitted in with the political opportunity at the time, which was to expose the previous government as being old and out of touch compared to the newfangled, technological age Prime Minister being put forward in the Kevin 07 campaign. It was a very clever political campaign, and I suspect the member at the table had a bit to do with thinking about how it was run and won. All credit to them; it was a very good campaign. This issue fitted in with it perfectly because it was a future-looking infrastructure issue. But the truth is there was no detail put into the work behind it. It was a campaign promise made with the figure of $4.7 billion plucked from the air: ‘This sounds like a good idea: 98 per cent of the country for 12 megs per second.’

That was not then possible to implement post the election. They had to seriously sit down and work out what they were going to. Rather than say, ‘Actually, we might have made a mistake here; we shouldn’t have got rid of the coalition’s OPEL plan to cover the underserviced areas’—which, had they continued with it, would have meant that today we would have faster broadband in my electorate and in many regional electorates throughout Australia—they cut that. They needed the money and cut that plan. Instead they announced this National Broadband Network mark 2. We heard the Minister for Finance and Deregulation today talking about just how important a superfast internet was and so forth.

The reason that we have this bill is because Telstra did not want to cooperate with this whole idea, and if you do not have Telstra playing ball on this issue you do not have a plan. That is the truth of it, because Telstra have the network, of course; they have the asset; they have the means to deliver it. So the government had to do something. They found that Telstra was strangely not willing to be part of a $42 billion plan for which there is no business case, which no-one knows how to do and which does not make a lot of sense. What they have done is ask, ‘What would be the most attractive thing that Telstra would be looking for into the future?’ and then threaten it through a piece of legislation.

It is an extraordinary attack on a business in our country. For a government to use the power of this place to attack a private company is extraordinary. Telstra is now actually a private company, of course. The previous government sold Telstra. Those opposite, who are supposedly completely committed to microeconomic reform, as we heard from the member for Lindsay, opposed that every step of the way—as they did pretty much every piece of legislation in the previous 11½ years. So you have a private company that is being attacked through legislative means by a government. You have a very large group of shareholders who will lose value with no compensation—not that we know of at this point in time; I suspect that in the end they will get very good compensation. So who loses in the end? The taxpayer.

The reason that Telstra is as integrated as it is is because the previous Labor government, with the communications minister, the Hon. Kim Beazley, the new Ambassador to the United States of America, made the decision to have Telstra as one entity. That is why the company is the size that it is today. It was the next government, the Howard government, that sold Telstra as it was. It sold Telstra as an integrated company, including the network asset and the retail arm. I believe that if we could again have our time in the early 1990s we would separate Telstra from its network and its retail operations. We should have done so. We made a mistake in the early part of the 1990s.

But the problem with these things is that you cannot unscramble the egg, because somebody will get hurt. The member for Lindsay claimed that all we are talking about here are the shareholders. I do not agree with that at all. The taxpayer will carry the can on this, because there will be a huge compensation bill for the government to pay on this. Our Constitution protects private companies at least to that extent. I am not sure that we can even change that here. So the taxpayer will lose on this, and all because this minister has absolutely failed to come up with a decent broadband plan. This is slogans above reality.

What we saw was a very clever political campaign run against the previous government. That has now run into the reality of the brick wall of government, where they cannot do what they said that they wanted to do. Who will pay? Sure, the shareholders of Telstra will pay. But it will be the taxpayers who will pay. They will be the people who carry the can on this. That is the great tragedy in what the government is trying to do here.

It is absolutely outrageous that in our free and open democratic country the government would use the parliament to threaten, bully and legislate a company into submission. No-one is saying at all that our regulations as to the telecommunications industry are perfect. I would agree. I went through a little bit of this in the last 12 months of the previous government, and it is a minefield. The role of the ACCC is a very difficult one and it has been challenged over a long period of time. Telstra have not helped themselves. They are an easy company to attack and to use as a whipping boy. They do things like creating the recent $2.20 fee. That was, frankly, a dumb decision for a company like Telstra to make. They encourage community mirth. However, that is not to say that we should in this place then legislate them out of existence or legislate them so that they behave in the way that this government wants them to behave. You simply should not do that. It is a dangerous path, in my view, that we are going down in doing this.

This government will regret the decisions of this minister. This minister has fundamentally failed to recognise the realities of what he is trying to do with this piece of legislation. I support very much the shadow minister’s approach to this issue. The government would be very wise to wait for its implementation study—or its scoping studies—to be finalised, which I understand will be early next year. It is not that long a time to wait. What they are hoping for, I suspect, is for this legislation to not have to be used. What they are actually hoping for is for Telstra to come to them on bended knee saying: ‘We’re sorry. We know we’ve misbehaved. We’ll be better in the future and we’ll play ball.’ To that extent, the new management team seems to have a more reasonable approach to public policy than the previous management team; that is for sure.

It was interesting to see the member for Lindsay defending a former government relations officer at Telstra previously. I am not sure that his constituents would agree with him on that. I also noticed that the member for Lindsay talked about different advisers’ or analysts’ recommendations about what will happen with the Telstra share price. He quoted one in particular, but he did not fully go through what exactly they had said. They also said that the NBN cannot be delivered until 2025. I am not sure that the member for Lindsay got the full briefing note on that one.

I also noticed—if we are going to talk about people’s views on this in the national newspapers—that in the Australian Financial Review on 14 October there was an article which said:

Investors Mutual is an Australian equities specialist that has more than $3 billion in funds under management for a range of clients across the country. It has a conservative investment style with a long-term focus and aims to deliver consistent returns for its clients.

We are strongly of the view that the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment Bill 2009 is not in the best interests of Australia’s population of 21 million and is certainly not in the best interests of Telstra’s 1.4 million shareholders.

That is one. Another view is from Peter Swan, who is an academic at the University of New South Wales. The Labor Party used to like academics and what they had to say. He was a little stronger with his language in the Australian newspaper on 16 September, where he wrote an opinion piece. The headline was ‘Rudd playing Ned Kelly with Telstra,’ and he said:

Shareholders will be the biggest losers from the government’s unconstitutional moves against the telco.

He compared the government’s behaviour—they were his words, not mine—to Latin American dictatorships and an Asian country which we have a very strong trading relationship with. There are a range of views on this, as there always are on investment decisions and so forth, so I think the member for Lindsay needs to be a little careful in relying on just a couple.

The inescapable truth is that the government has not come to grips, at this point in time, with just how much money this will cost them. If they force Telstra to structurally separate there will be a massive compensation claim—and all because of their flawed NBN mark II. So we think they need to go back to the drawing board on this. We think this approach of using this place to try to belt Telstra into submission is wrong. We think there is a better way to go about broadbanding this country. If that is what it is about then there is a better way to go about it.

The government’s approach in this place is to accuse the opposition of being laggards on the issue of broadband or of not understanding the speed, the cost, the commitment and the need for it in Australia. They compare us to countries like the Slovak Republic, which I think is about 79,000 square kilometres in size. My electorate is about 9,500 square kilometres, so I am not sure we are actually comparing apples with apples in that respect—to use that much overused metaphor. If you look at countries like the United States and Canada you find that Australia actually compares reasonably well. And you have to compare us with countries like those, you see, because of the tyranny of distance. It is the great challenge of Australia.

You cannot have the same system across Australia. You cannot have a fibre network that services all of Australia. It is just not economical; it is just not possible. You need a range of technologies, and that is what we have always argued. There are places—I said this last time we talked about broadband in this place and a couple of interesting emails were posted—in Australia, many of them in capital cities, where you can get the best speeds available today. There are not enough of those places. Sure, we need some more investment, but there will investment because the companies will be attracted. That is the very nature of the market. In the big cities that will not be a problem. The issue is, of course, in the under-serviced areas like my electorate and many electorates like mine around the country—the outer metro and regional electorates, like that of the member of Mallee. The member for Mallee represents that great township of Mildura, which has always had challenges. When I was growing up there, there were two TV stations. Those are the places where government needs to invest to ensure that those citizens keep up with reasonable speeds at reasonable costs. That is where the focus for broadband in Australia should be.

Having a large integrated company actually helps with that. It helps ensure that you can service under-serviced areas through funding black-spot types of programs or assisting with the funding of technologies which help keep those places comparable with their city cousins. So I think there is a mistake in the way that the government is using this as a political bludgeoning tool instead of recognising the policy reality that is broadband in Australia.

As I said at the start, the developing speed of the 3G network that Telstra, Optus and others are implementing is clearly part of the answer into the future. It will be more attractive for people to use wireless technology at reliable and fast speeds, and that all relies on that spectrum being available for the companies to use. That is where this legislation is most vicious—it uses what is an attractive and necessary technology for the future as the gun at the head of parliament to force a policy outcome that this government wants for political reasons. They talked themselves into a problem with their promise originally—before the last election. It was a mistake. It was very clever politically but it was never possible policy-wise. It was a five-page document, from memory. At least there was a document in that respect. On this policy there is not even a business plan. There is $42 billion, with the taxpayer footing the bill.

Those opposite allege that our interests here are with the shareholders only. That is simply not true. Sure, we are representing over one million shareholders, including people in my electorate who are very worked up about this, but we are actually representing the best interests of the Australian taxpayer and the best interests of the Australian consumer when it comes to broadband, because the government is wrong-headed on this issue. They are going down the wrong path. They are using the parliament in an inappropriate fashion. It is a dangerous step for us to take. I oppose the decision of this government and I support very much our amendments on this bill.

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