Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

This government is taking $43 billion—this is not a $50,000 loan; this is $43 billion—from the Australian people, from Australians’ taxes, and asking this parliament, their representatives, to approve it, and we have not seen any business plan at all. All that we have seen is a study by McKinsey, and all we know about that is that the NBN management disagrees with it, so we literally have no basis for knowing what this network is going to look like in terms of its architecture, its design, its cost and its economic impacts. I say to all honourable members here—government members, opposition members and above all the crossbenchers: if you seriously believe in the so-called new paradigm, if you seriously believe in accountability, if you seriously believe in letting the sunshine in, how can you allow this government to keep all of us and all Australians in the dark and spend so much money with no scrutiny, no accountability and no information?

We talk a lot here about the digital divide and the importance of making internet access available to everybody. We note that 76 per cent of people in the major metropolitan cities have access to the internet at home and only about 63 per cent in the outer regional areas do. That is something that policy should address, and our policy in 2007, the OPEL policy, would have done that and our policies today would do that. We are totally committed, as I hope the government is, to ensuring there is affordable universal broadband, particularly in those regions. But where the big digital divide is is one based on income. Only 43 per cent of households with incomes of less than $40,000 a year have access to the internet at home. For higher incomes it is almost a hundred per cent, the high 80s and mid-90s penetration. So the big digital divide is marked by income, and that is why affordability of access is vital. The NBN will make internet access more expensive, not cheaper.

It will make it more expensive because it is a massively capitalised government monopoly. The arrangements the government is putting in place with Telstra about which the OECD has expressed such grave concern will prevent any competition with the NBN from facilities such as the Telstra HFC network. There will be nothing to stand in the way of the NBN charging very high prices, and indeed, because of the huge capital burden its architects have imposed on it, it will have a very great incentive to do so. The McKinsey plan, which has been disowned—I do not know whether this part of it has been disowned—forecasts internet access prices increasing by at least four per cent a year for the next decade. Internet prices have been coming down precipitously over the last decade. We are going to spend apparently $43 billion of taxpayers’ money to send them up again.

This is crying out for rigorous analysis. The government says, ‘You only want to send it to the Productivity Commission because you want to kill the NBN.’ Well, we are utterly committed to universal and affordable broadband. We are utterly committed to the end, to the goal. The question is what the most cost-effective means is, and that is why one business group, one business leader after another, one leading economist after another, has called for a cost-benefit analysis to be performed. The telecommunications sector is calling for a cost-benefit analysis to be performed. The second tier telcos in the Alliance for Affordable Broadband—PIPE Networks, Allegro, Vocus and others, these companies who it is claimed will be great beneficiaries of the NBN—themselves have pleaded with the Independent members of this House to support the reference to the Productivity Commission. The only voices opposing a reference to the Productivity Commission are the people who do not want the truth to be told, who do not want the facts to be revealed, who want $43 billion of taxpayers’ money to be spent without any scrutiny, without any accountability, without any responsibility.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I commend this bill to the House.

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