Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure of mine to be able to speak to this report—the fifth and final report of the joint committee. It is a project that has had a great degree of oversight in the rollout and in the management of the project itself. In fact, I have from time to time been concerned that we have overlaid too much oversight. I am certainly one for, obviously, the parliamentary ability to probe and test the way in which government business enterprises like this operate. But, when you consider all of the ways in which this project has people looking at it, you would not have a similar level of investigation imposed on an organisation external to government.

Having said that, NBN Co. has always sought—from my impression, and I am sure it would be the impression of others, particularly on the government side—to cooperate with questions and to be available to answer inquiries from members of parliament. Be it in estimates, the joint committee or the public hearings, they have tried to do the right thing, to talk about a project that is going to transform this nation. There is no doubt that this will economically transform the way that we operate, and it will put us at an advantage compared to other countries that have not been able to do this to the same breadth and the same level of detail that has been undertaken in this project.

It is an investment of just over $30 billion in a technology that is already, through the internet—if you take on board the Deloitte study—contributing about $50 billion in economic value to this country currently, and will contribute $70 billion into the future. It has already been indicated that that investment will have a return of seven per cent, but, to be honest, I see that the actual return itself will come when you look at the way that it will change the manner in which the economy operates, the way in which firms operate, the way in which communities connect and interrelate, the way that education is delivered in this country, and the way that health care is delivered in this country. On top of these things, the fact that there are applications and there are ways in which technology that is not currently known will do the same thing, is something to note.

I had the opportunity recently to speak to a venture tech firm, BlueChilli, that operate out of Sydney. They bring together capital and people who want to transform the way in which things are done at the moment through their own ideas, their own innovative energy, and completely alter the way in which people operate and conduct their business. These types of firms, from what I have seen—and this firm is based in the Sydney CBD—are doing remarkable things in terms of changing the way the business operates. And they certainly always encourage the innovators within their organisations to continue to think differently about what can be done, what we do now and how we can do it differently, and how we can add value to the economy. These are the types of firms that get unleashed when they have access to a technology that has been using, as a platform, what we are doing through the National Broadband Network.

Through this process we have tackled a massive capacity constraint. It is well known that the former government was told by bodies such as the Reserve Bank that capacity constraints would limit the ability of the economy to grow and that failing to do so would hurt the economy into the longer term. Those opposite tried, as has been reflected upon here, 19 times to address the fact that people could not get access to broadband. I represent people who had previously been stuck in a dial-up world—or a broadband wasteland, as I have described it—and faced very little chance that they would actually get access to modern telecommunications infrastructure. As a result of what we have been doing, we have been able, through a combination of the work being done by Telstra and the rollout being done by NBN Co., to free these people from being stuck with dial-up, which in this day and age is the technological equivalent of a dinosaur. We have freed suburbs such as Woodcroft and Doonside from that.

Last week my colleague the member for Greenway and I were proud to turn the NBN on in Blacktown with the minister for communications, Stephen Conroy. This has already seen 1,300 homes having access to the NBN at the outset. What has also been great is that RSPs like Telstra and Optus are out there now actively seeking customers and getting a tremendous response from customers who are wanting to sign up. In actual fact, if you look at the fifth report itself—and this is important—on page 19 it indicates that the revenue that NBN is receiving as a result of the RSPs going out and connecting customers and having this then flow back to NBN Co was $5.3 million and has risen by nearly $2 million since June of last year. So, in a short space of time it is already increasing the amount of money that it is generating as a result of customers coming onboard. And, as has been anecdotally indicated to me, once the customers get onboard with the NBN their usage changes. They use more and they want to be able to—and are certainly happy to—change their plans, because they are getting value for money per gigabyte that they are using as a household. And households like small businesses—for example, accounting firms that operate from home and design firms that operate from home—are now able to access a network. The more these home based businesses operate and the more people can change the way in which they work through telework, the more we will see other benefits. For example, in Western Sydney we are plagued very much by this issue of congestion in terms of traffic and the like. Being able to have economic development in local areas rather than having people feel that they have to travel long distances to conduct work will have huge economic benefit.

I mentioned earlier that there are other countries that have tried to do what we are doing. If you look at the US in particular, Verizon, through its fibre optic service, had gone to five states but has slowed down in its delivery because it does not have a dedicated investment program, unlike what is happening here. And Google is now rolling out fibre in Kansas and Utah and is expecting that these networks will operate profitably. Others are catching up and recognise that the use of this fibre instead of copper—fibre that delivers light at 300,000 kilometres per second and delivers a signal that has much more capacity and benefit and ability than anything that can be delivered on fibre—is a serious way in which to construct a future network.

That is why, when the opposition were in government, they had committees looking at this, and the member for Sturt even indicated in reports that he authored that, hands down, fibre is the best form of technology to deliver a modern broadband network. Certainly that has been evident, and there is very little to suggest otherwise. There is a suggestion that there will be a better form of technology—for example, a reliance on vectoring. Yes, vectoring does have its benefits, but most people will tell you that it is nowhere near as good as having fibre to the premises. Those opposite have had to come up with a policy for the sake of a policy but, having spent the best part of this parliamentary term determined to kill off this project, they have been unable to, due to two things. Firstly, they have an idea that nothing is wrong with the current broadband network in this country—and that does not stack up. Secondly, they have realised that businesses and the community expect a modern, robust form of infrastructure that will ensure that the country can progress in the years ahead and not stumble along in the way that they had been overseeing it when they were in office.

The opposition are continually focussed on the claim—and we continue to get this; we heard it from the member for Wentworth, and others, not necessarily those currently in the chamber, will probably bleat on today in reference to it—that NBN Co has failed to meet its forecast. In fact, the member for Wentworth today used the term 'catastrophic failure'.

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