Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to speak on these appropriation bills. In the time available to me I would like to speak about important public policy considerations regarding value for money and sound public administration when it comes to the area of broadband and communications. This is an area where truth and honesty are enormously important. Unfortunately and regrettably for the people of Australia, it is an area which for most of the last six years has been in the hands of the former minister for broadband, Senator Conroy. It was a richly ironic spectacle to see that same man last week while asking questions in the estimates process in another place slam the table and say, 'Can't you handle the truth?' That was the question asked by Senator Conroy. Those who have watched the inglorious period in which he has had custody of broadband and communications policy in this nation would say to themselves, what a rich irony indeed that this man should be saying, 'Can't you handle the truth?'

Let us have a look at some of the more inglorious moments in the Conrovian approach to public policy, if I can appropriate for present purposes the adjective which the Minister for Communications has appropriately coined and which has become a byword for public policy incompetence. Let us look first at the Conrovian promise regarding the original fibre-to-the-node network when in March 2007 the then shadow communications minister promised to build a fixed broadband network using fibre to the node to deliver a speed of 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australians. He promised it was going to cost a mere $4.7 billion of public money and it was going to be done in five years. What was the status five years later, five years after that March 2007 promise? By March 2012, far from reaching 98 per cent, Labor's broadband policy had delivered fixed broadband services to less than one-10th of one per cent of the targeted 10 million premises. In fact, its fibre network had a mere 2,315 services in operation, five years after that Conrovian promise of March 2007.

One of the more extraordinary Conrovian claims is to be found in a speech made by the then shadow minister in September 2007 in the Senate in which he said:

Labor's carefully costed fibre to the node network is based on a detailed calculation of the number of nodes required to reach 98 per cent of Australians. This includes the number of upgrades of exchanges and pillars internodes that are required.

Anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with the inglorious history of this extraordinary public policy disaster will know that the claim that the then shadow minister had carefully costed his fibre-to-the-node policy is, on a charitable description, heroic. In fact, the true cost of this network was always going to be vastly higher than the $4.7 billion figure because the then shadow minister used a figure which was taken from a 2005 proposal made by Telstra that, for $4.7 billion of government money plus its own money, Telstra would upgrade its network to deliver 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of premises.

But there are at least two crucial reasons why that figure was incorrectly, inaccurately and inappropriately used by the then shadow minister. Firstly, Telstra's figure was a request for a subsidy. There was certainly no intention on the part of Telstra that in exchange for the $4.7 billion government would get an ownership stake in the network, as the Labor policy in 2007 assumed. Secondly, the Telstra 2005 proposal did not involve fibre to the node to 98 per cent of premises; it involved a mix of existing and new networks and technologies which would have been very materially less expensive than the Conrovian model of fibre to the node to 98 per cent of premises.

The flaws and inaccuracies in the Conrovian model were revealed once he tried to implement it. His intended private sector partner was Telstra but Telstra refused to participate in the plan, and so in April 2009 the then minister by this time abandoned his first plan and announced his second, now to be a fibre-to-the-premises network to 90 per cent of premises with wireless and satellite to the rest, and the cost would be $43 billion. So let us assess what he promised in March 2007 and what he delivered. He promised the new network would be substantially private-sector funded with public funding capped at $4.7 billion. In fact—

Debate interrupted.

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