Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amend­ment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011. The NBN is an issue in my electorate and it is an issue around Australia. The electorate believes this is a very ham-fisted, expensive operation to deliver what could have been delivered by the private sector. Now the government is essentially renationalising communications in Australia. We are going back to the days of the PMG. We are almost in the business of renationalising telecomm­unications and phones, et cetera. The government wants to control and own everything that we operate now.

What brought this about? What made the Labor Party decide to spend somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion? And why do I use such a wide range of figures? Because the government does do not know how much it will end up costing. It was not that long ago that we heard NBN Co., through its pristine-charactered Mr Quigley, say it could not get anyone to build the network, so it pulled the contracts. Nobody wanted to build it for the cost it was thought it could be built for. Of course there are going to blowouts. The people who saw this build as a cash cow are now suddenly running into a bit of heavy weather.

Why are we in the position we are in? Largely because the Labor Party, on taking office, fell out with Telstra. We did not like Sol Trujillo very much—I certainly did not and I said a lot of unkind things about him in this House, which were largely all true—but falling out with somebody does not mean you decide to totally uproot the system you have and then go and borrow a massive amount of money to renationalise telecom­munications in this country. President Obama had the same situation confronting him in the last 12 months and, rather than saying it was all too hard and he would get the government to build it, he allowed the private sector to roll out enhancements to the telecommunications system in the United States with a mix of technologies.

As previous speakers, including the member for Moncrieff, have said, we have put a lot of eggs in one basket. We have gone with fibre to the premises, which used to be called fibre to the node, and this is the most expensive option that could have been chos­en. Our shadow minister, the member for Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull, knows something about this. He was one of the early entrants into this technology years ago, when he was a cofounder of an internet company, so his credentials in this area are quite good. He describes this as watching a slow-motion train wreck, and that is what is happening—it is a slow-motion train wreck on the roll-out and implementation of this program.

The sad thing is that the future mums and dads of Australia and their children will be paying for this slow-motion train wreck even although it did not need to happen. There could have been a fat controller at the signals to stop this slow-motion train wreck. The controller is not there because both the previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the current Prime Minister have just given the Minister for Broadband, Comm–unications and the Digital Economy his head and allowed him to run rampant on this issue. I am in one of those curious electorates that causes problems for this particular rollout. I have high-density urban, outer metropolitan, semi-rural, rural, agricultural, hills, beach sides, small towns under 1,000 people—I have the whole gamut. That is why people in my electorate are very concerned about this issue. In fact, they have called public meetings on this and they have called me to meetings in their own houses to say: 'We are very concerned. What is happening to that Telstra line that goes past my house now? Will I still be connected to that or do I have to sign over?' When it first started people were not sure, but we know now that Telstra has received $11 billion in taxpayers' money from NBN Co. to take over its lines. Of course Telstra and its shareholders are happy because it is an absolute cash cow at the moment, but the good old taxpayers of Australia have forked out $11 billion to take over existing infrastructure. Whether it gets used or whether it is overlaid in certain areas, we do not know.

The incredible thing about this is that by having put all their eggs in one basket and given the number of years it will take to rollout, there is a real chance that eventually the technology we are talking about could be redundant by the time it gets to your home. In Piara Waters and Harrisdale in my electorate there is an area that is partly greenfields and partly constructed and Telstra have stopped putting infrastructure into that area. The residents there have asked me, 'I cannot get ready access, so what are you going to do?' With their old copper wire network and RIM technology, Telstra are feeding out a few ports here and there from their exchanges, but they are not committing to any significant build because they are saying to my constituents, 'We're not going to come and build anything new for you because the NBN's coming and we're not going to spend any money on something that is going to be overlaid in the next six, eight or 10 years.' As a result, they say, 'Here's a phone for you.' They give them a second-rate mobile phone to use because of the universal service obligation. It is just a short-term fix. It really is a bizarre situation.

The towns that are further out in my electorate and which have fewer than 1,000 residents will not get part of this. We just heard the member for Moreton give us a figure of 93 per cent. I thought it was a bit higher than that, but I take his figure of 93 per cent. A whole lot of small towns in my electorate, like Jarrahdale, Mundijong, Serpentine and Preston Beach, will not be getting any meaningful telephony or internet connection through the NBN. To me it is really quite wrong and sad for anyone who is in an outer urban area to not get those services, despite this massive spend.

Mandurah in my electorate is an example of how we need to address some of the original problems. It is about an hour from Perth and it is still on timed local calls. We are trying to get Telstra and the regulators to broaden the zone, but the town is still paying for timed local calls in this day and age. We heard from the member for Moncrieff telling us about how on the Gold Coast, Telstra, as a private operator, is currently running out lines that are capable of 100 megabits per second. I have an article here titled, 'Move aside NBN, the future's already here.' It says:

Australia's Academic and Research Network say they're doing what the NBN will do in a decade, today.

So NBN Co. is going to take a decade to get speeds of 100 megabits per second to your house, but here we have AARNET giving the NBN a run for its money because they are going to deliver those speeds now through something quite simple:

… the research network announced yesterday that it successfully boosted the delivery speeds of its existing fibre optic network simply by placing 40GB 'muxponders'—supersized transponders—onto either ends of the cable.

You put these muxponders at either end of the cable and you get these speeds over longer distances. So the technology is going to race ahead of the NBN, despite its cost. I have two cases in my electorate that bear going over again. I have raised these before and they have not been fixed. There is the case of the Carey Baptist College in Forrestfield in my electorate which needed decent speeds for the school. It has outgrown its own site right now and it is going to move onto another greenfield site further down the road, which will have its own issues of internet connection and telephones et cetera. The school has sought my help in getting faster speeds and better connections. I have pointed out that Telstra does not want to help anymore because the NBN is meant to be coming to this region. Interestingly, and I say this in the nicest way because Senator Sterle and I have an arrangement on these matters—we criticise each other and we have broad enough shoulders to handle each other's criticism—in an article on 21 June 2011 it was reported:

Labor Senator Glenn Sterle took a swipe at Canning MHR Don Randall over his claims Carey Baptist College’s broadband and internet problems were due to the National Broadband Network.

Mr Sterle said Mr Randall attempted to lay blame on the NBN despite knowing the problems had existed for more than a decade.

As I pointed out in this article, it was a free kick, Senator Sterle, because when this school was being constructed I was there to try to force Telstra to provide the services to the school. I assure you that if I had not involved myself in this the state office would have said: 'We have no arrangement. In fact, they'll have to pay for the infrastructure costs. This is a non-government school.' So they tried that on for a while and when we decided to put a bit of pressure on them at the national level they eventually came good. So thank you for the free kick, Senator Sterle. Paul Oates, the administrator from the school, pointed out that if I had not been involved, they would not have got it. But they are still struggling because there is this big disconnect: Telstra are not providing anything because, 'The NBN's coming' and the NBN are saying, 'We don't know if we are going to get there.' Even Mandurah, whom Senator Sterle refers to in this article, are saying that it is going to be one of the first places to be rolled out. Most of the infrastructure is in the ground in Mandurah but the speeds are not sufficient. They have already set a few dates when Mandurah will be rolled out and every one of them has been missed. They failed all the rollout dates for the particular location in Mandurah around Halls Head.

Finally, I point to an article in the local newspaper which is headed 'Phone delay frustrates'. Tilling Timber state manager, Jeremy Coleman, says that for 18 months he has been promised phone and internet. The developer in the industrial estate had put the infrastructure in the ground but they have no service because Telstra was not interested in connecting because, remember, 'The NBN's coming.' Telstra did not want to do it, so what did Tilling Timber have to do? They had to spend $36,000 to install an elaborate substitute to get phone and internet connections. They had to get a wireless link from Armadale's industrial park to the R&I building in Perth to get a connection and then that was rerouted through the office. It is the same with their phones. Other businesses out there decided they would not start building until this was sorted out. It was not until I got away from the state office of Telstra and I wrote to David Thodey, chief executive of Telstra, where I pointed out that there was infrastructure in the ground that I got the response that they would put copper wire in that particular area. Before I came into the chamber, I checked on Tilling Timber in this industrial area and I found that they still do not have their infrastructure and they are still not connected to the Telstra network, and they are waiting for other arrangements to be put in place.

This you beaut, fantastic huge NBN investment that could have been done privately with a mix of technologies like wireless and satellite is now going to have all its eggs in one basket. Instead of economical fibre to the node so that copper can be connected to the home, they have gone for the most expensive model, which could be redundant in years. Dare I say, this is one of the failings of this government: if it is not your money, spend it like the Watsons because it does not matter. That is why this government are in trouble electorally, because people do not believe they can deliver for them. (Time expired)

See this speech in context