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

I want to respond to some of these points. The Minister for Infrastructure and Transport demonstrated touching concern for the plight of regional and rural Australia and broadband services therein and said that there had been failed schemes. One scheme that failed to take effect was the OPEL scheme that was established by the previous government. That scheme would have delivered fast broadband services to regional Australia. That scheme was fully funded and was abandoned by the Rudd government immediately on coming into government. The melancholy truth is that people in regional and rural Australia would have access to broadband now if the Howard government’s plan for broadband services had been allowed to go forward.

Let me respond to the member for Greenway, who said that the only consequence of the privatisation of Telstra was the production of a lot of paper. Presumably, some of that paper was produced by the legal profession, which did very well with Telstra. She was a distinguished member of that noble profession. Her denigration of the sale of Telstra is a little unconvincing on that ground.

In a nutshell, without going through these amendments in the finest detail, they simply remove the obligation for the National Broadband Network to be completed before it is sold. That is the major amendment. The member for Greenway said it was a good idea to legislate that the finance minister says that circumstances are propitious for a sale. That is like legislating for ministers to do their duty. Obviously, no government—of any persuasion, one would hope—would sell a major asset other than when conditions were suitable for a sale.

If our amendments are accepted, there will remain a provision for a Productivity Commission inquiry to be held into the sale and for consideration by the joint parliamentary committee. This is not a question of parliament being, if you like, prevented from having oversight of the process. Our amendments would prevent this parliament from binding the hands of many future parliaments, because this network will take many years—perhaps many decades—to complete. This network cannot be sold until such time as it is complete. The provisions we are seeking to delete are effectively the poisoned pill designed to make it virtually impossible for the NBN ever to be sold.

The reality is that we are a free market economy. We have had a lot of lectures in the context of climate change from the Prime Minister about the virtues of the market, the law of supply and demand and the benefits of taking market approaches to measures. She is not very consistent, because this is an area where for decades there was a common commitment to getting government out and getting competition into the sector. What we have here is government going back into it at a level of investment that is staggering. We should remember that, for considerably less than the total amount of the investment in the NBN, the government could actually buy Telstra at its current market price. I am not suggesting that it should renationalise Telstra, but it gives you some idea of the scale of investment.

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