Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to address the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011. The bill is designed to push ahead with the National Broadband Network by ensuring new developments include fibre to the premises. We all remember that originally the promise was fibre in the home.

I would like to start by saying that the coalition will be moving amendments to this bill. They are amendments that will increase competition because, as we know, competition is what brings about lower prices. Of course, Labor does not want and has never wanted competition. It wants to build the largest infrastructure project in Australia's history and make it a government monopoly. It is a monopoly that would decrease competition and make broadband unaffordable for the very same people whose taxpayers' dollars built it in the first place—but more about that later.

This bill will ensure that greenfield developments—that is, new housing est­ates—include fibre to the premises. This is good news for those moving into new developments in my region such as developments like Chisholm, which is the old Thornton North, which will have over the next few years a couple of thousand new households. In the future they will need to include infrastructure in those developments for broadband. According to the NBN there are 1.9 million homes that will need to be connected by 2020.

The coalition amendments ensure that the developers behind these new estates have real choice, rather than being dictated to by a government on who they must use. Our amendments will mean that developers can choose a cable operator, such as TransACT or Opticom to name but a few, to install the cable according to industry specifications, rather than having to wait for the NBN to show up and do the job. This not only will mean that cables will be installed quickly and efficiently, but it will keep our cable operators in business and provide jobs and competition. The one thing that this government has missed is that one of the things that drives up housing costs in development projects are holding costs such as delays in getting approvals and delays in getting services. I can already see the delays that will be incurred by this government through singling out a monopolistic oper­ation such as the NBN, which will increase the holding costs before a block of land can be sold and therefore will increase the costs to householders.

The second point I would like to make on behalf of thousands of my constituents and those in Hunter electorates, who have been completely ignored by their Labor members of parliament, is the plight of towns under 1,000 residences that will not be covered by Labor's NBN optical-fibre cable rollout. My electorate has many towns that are under 1,000 residences. I was absolutely disgusted sitting here yesterday listening to the member for Newcastle lie and lie about her party's uncosted broadband plan.

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