Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

His electorate is one of the very worst. I will gladly give him the ranking of his electorate. The people who are able to get the retail benefits are the access seekers. If they get the same wholesale price do you know what that means? It is really interesting. It means that they can compete on price and non-price quality for people called end users. They can compete on getting better retail pricing. They can compete on innovation. They can compete on service delivery. The whole price and non-price competition regime depends on getting the wholesale level right.

Of all people, the member for Wentworth comes in here and bangs on about the issue being the lack of income. Firstly, what would he know about lack of income? If you want to talk about affordability and how this will benefit consumers, I suggest those opposite get a Gregory’s and come out to Blacktown and Mt Druitt to see communities that are crying out for transformational change in health, education and social inclusion. This is what they have been crying out for. Do not just take it from me. I have stood up in this place and gladly given examples of people in my own electorate who want this to happen. It is not some flight of fancy that has been made up. Believe or not, people actually want superfast broadband to transform their communities.

You have to ask why broadband services are so expensive and why we are so bad in the world rankings. It is a price and non-price problem. It is also a failure of facilities based competition in Australia. Those opposite rant about how we should have competitive networks that the market will deliver, but the market has not delivered—the market has failed. For us on this side, when the market fails we step in for the good of the end user. We see when market failure occurs and we say, ‘Governments need to do something about it.’ This is what we believe in.

I am waiting for a few things from the other side and they are welcome to let me know. I am still waiting for them to enlighten me on what they did for broadband pricing in 12 years. Not one of them has been able to answer that.

This motion talks about consumers and I will mention again that there are two levels of consumers: there is the individual end user and there is the retail end user. At every single stage in the NBN implementation those two groups of consumers are protected. As I have said, the retail level is protected by the ACCC regulating a wholesale price. End users are protected because as consumers they are getting, amongst other things, a raft of benefits that went through the other night as part of the new regulatory regime.

There are also the accompanying reforms in universal service. How many inquiries did we have into the USO that produced no substantive benefit in Australia while those opposite were in government? There is the customer service guarantee and priority assistance. All of these things are being improved for consumers.

Do not take it from me; take it from ATUG, which is one of the leading consumer telco organisations. I will read one of their suggestions about the NBN to the Senate inquiry in 2008:

• End User Choice—network design is central to competition and choice … When infrastructure competition is not possible, services competition based on open access and service equivalence at a wholesale level must be ensured.

Guess what? That is what the NBN is. So to come in here and say that the consumers of Australia are not being served by the NBN is a complete farce. We have not only many individuals but also many businesses telling us that they want the NBN and that they need high-speed broadband in order to compete on a global level and to make distance irrelevant. For those regional members who come in here and simply interject but who have never participated in this debate, I say to them that they should go back to their communities and see that the tyranny of distance is alive and well when it comes to broadband.

We had the member for Cowper also say that our grandchildren are going to curse us for the NBN. I would tell him the exact opposite: over the break, go back to your electorates and speak to some young people—

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