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

I will deal with both of those questions. First, briefly, to the member for Blaxland: I understand his interest in the anti-siphoning list. It is something that everyone is very keenly interested in. It tends to be amended every few years as circumstances change. We do not have any plans to make any changes to it, but we are certainly in the process of engaging with the broadcasting sector and talking about regulatory reform generally. He also asked whether I would guarantee that all changes to broadcasting law would be part of one package. That is certainly what at least one network has argued should be the case. That is a perfectly reasonable proposition to make and that is all under consideration. We are being very, very transparent in our discussions with the media sector. Given the engaging and convivial nature of the participants, I am sure that our discussions will rapidly come to the knowledge of most members of the public.

Turning to the member for Banks's question about the NBN, he has described very well the very sorry state of this project and its development. The truth is that the Labor government started off with a conventional approach to broadband—conventional by global standards—in the sense of proposing to get the private sector to upgrade the national network and to provide a subsidy to ensure that uneconomic areas got a service. In one form or another that is the norm pretty well everywhere.

Then, when that tender did not work out, there was this enormous leap into a unique, hitherto untried approach for any major country—to have the government build an entirely new broadband network in a start-up company. That was the fundamental mistake. The next big mistake they made was specifying one access technology instead of specifying or promising a service level and being flexible about technology. And, as the honourable member asks about, the consequence of this has been a colossal failure. Very little progress has been made and a huge amount of money has been committed.

When we took over government in September we arranged for the NBN Co to undertake a strategic review. It was designed to find out the current state of the project and what our options are. The current state of the project is: if the Labor government's policy was continued business as usual, the peak funding requirement would be $72.6 billion—$28.5 billion more than forecast. The consequence of that, naturally, would be that broadband prices would have to go up—up to 80 per cent more, on average. You cannot have a massively overcapitalised government monopoly, or a monopoly of any kind, and expect it to do anything other than put prices up. So it would be have been a shocking lose-lose for both the taxpayer and the consumer.

The review examined why these problems and delays occurred. It identified a number of cultural issues, which was very interesting. It noted that, within the NBN Co, there was a sort of group-think—a blind faith in the achievability of the corporate plan, notwithstanding clear factual evidence to the contrary. As the honourable member and NBN Co's current management have pointed out, the previous approach was not so much fibre-to-the-premises as fibre-to-the-press-release. They were seeking to pass as many premises with fibre as they could so they could say, 'We have passed X thousand premises'—and they missed all of those targets—without actually taking care to ensure that those premises could be connected. This led to the extraordinary consequence that, in some areas which were declared ready for service, only a very small percentage—in some cases, less than 10 per cent—were able to get a connection if they rung up because the rest did not have a lead-in and were either service class 0 or service class 1. It has been a catastrophic mess, and I will have the opportunity later to explain what we are doing to clean it up. (Time expired)

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