Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Now that the hysteria is over, let’s actually have a look at a few facts. One always finds with the opposition that if you inject a few facts into their ranting and raving then their case falls away. Fact No. 1: how did we get here with our telecommunications system? Let us look at the words of the OECD about how we got here. The OECD has commented:

Australia has fallen further and further behind the rest of the world since the Liberals and Nationals voted to privatise Telstra … without ever putting in place the arrangements to properly protect competition and services in regional areas.

There are those of us in this parliament who remember the Telstra privatisation debate. Members from rural and regional areas, including from the coalition, raised in this parliament time after time how the failure of the coalition to deal with the competition questions would disadvantage regional Australia. But the coalition did nothing. So this has resulted in a situation where, when we compare ourselves with countries with which we compete, when we compare ourselves with comparable nations around the world, Australia is now ranked 17th out of 31 countries for fixed broadband subscriptions. We are down the rankings. We also pay more for broadband than OECD countries. For average subscription prices Australia is the fifth most expensive overall. This is a recipe for disadvantaging Australians today and our international competitiveness tomorrow.

The Leader of the Opposition has spoken today in this place as if the parliament has never before had an opportunity to talk about broadband, as if the parliament has never before had the opportunity to debate and consider broadband. The opposition tries to pretend, when it gets up every morning, that somehow its sins of yesterday have been forgotten by everybody and they do not exist. We know, of course, that broadband has been debated in this parliament. We have had Senate report after Senate report, inquiry after inquiry—all participated in by the opposition. We have had the implementation study and the information flowing from that. As that information became available in the public domain, more and more of it backing the need for the National Broadband Network, what did the opposition do? Did it rationally digest this information? Did it feed it into its policies and plans? No, of course it did not. The reality is—and everybody in this parliament knows it—the opposition is not calling for the release of the business case because it is interested in the information in it. It is not interested in the business case at all. Whatever the business case says, the opposition has already locked in a policy setting of demolishing the NBN. It is irrelevant to them what was in the implementation study. It is irrelevant to them what is being debated in this parliament. It is irrelevant to them what has been discussed in Senate inquiries. They do not care about the facts because they have already locked into their policy setting: demolish the NBN. Whatever the business case says, the opposition will simply stay in its fixed position, in denial of the future, out there trying to demolish the NBN.

I understand that there are other members in this parliament, not the opposition but other members of this parliament, who actually understand the need for the NBN, who are not in denial of the future, who will properly read and absorb the business case of the NBN and then go out and tell their constituents the truth about it. I understand that there are members in this parliament of that ilk. They are not sitting on the opposition benches. I say to those members that the government will release the NBN business case. But I also to those members that this is a document of over 400 pages. It is lengthy, it is detailed and it looks at complex commercial and financial issues of costs and pricing and a number of these matters are commercially sensitive.

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