Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister inform the House of the importance of the structural separation of Telstra? Why is universal broadband vital reform for Australia?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. I know that she is one of the feistiest advocates we have in this parliament for the National Broadband Network and one of the most informed, and I thank her for her contribution. Major microeconomic reform is not easy. It is not easy but it is necessary for the country’s future. Today’s prosperity has been built on earlier waves of microeconomic reform like having the courage to float the dollar, like having the courage to reduce the tariff barriers which were making our economy inefficient and not competitive—microeconomic reforms that have worked to make us a more productive and a more prosperous nation, reforms that include superannuation and building up our pool of national savings, reforms that include competition policy to bear down on regulatory settings and to make sure that we had a leaner regulatory scope so that the economy could thrive and prosper.

These have been the tough reforms of the past, and now we need to engage in another major microeconomic reform. The reality is there are only so many times in a nation’s history when it gets the opportunity to structure its telecommunications system for the future. Our nation has basically had two opportunities in the modern age to get our telecommunications right, and each time the nation has not got the job done. Those two opportunities began when we saw the merger of Telecom and OTC and, of course, the most recent of those two opportunities was the privatisation of Telstra. The merger of Telecom and OTC in 1992 created a market giant which severely compromised competition and then, after the privatisation of Telstra, we saw that market giant out there without structural reform.

This is the day, this is the parliament and this is the time to deliver that structural reform to get the reform job done that has been left undone for 30 years, and we can get it done today, Mr Speaker. We can get it done today by seeing the passage in the Senate of the telecommunications legislation that would structurally separate Telstra.

We have been prepared to work with the crossbenchers in this House and with the Independent senators in the other place in order to secure passage of this legislation. We would, of course, have been prepared to work with the opposition but they made it painfully clear that what they wanted to do was demolish the NBN. They are not interested in reform, not interested in microeconomic reform, not interested in the future prosperity of the country or in the service delivery innovations we can see in health and education. None of that interests them. They are on, once again, a completely negative wrecking path.

Once they made it clear that their only objective was to wreck then it fell to us to work with the crossbenchers and the Independent senators to secure this major microeconomic reform. In pursuit of that we have released more information today: a summary of the National Broadband Network business case. I commend it to those members of the House that are seriously interested in understanding matters about the National Broadband Network, not those who simply seek to wreck. Of course, there is no point in them wasting their time reading it because they will not care what it says.