Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications I present the committee’s report entitled Broadening the debate: inquiry into the role and potential of the National Broadband Network, incorporating a dissenting report, together with the minutes of proceedings.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—This inquiry was referred to our committee on 16 November 2010 by the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the Hon. Anthony Albanese MP. We received 252 submissions, including 17 supplementary submissions and 42 exhibits. These submissions canvassed a range of topics related to the potential impact of the NBN, including across government services, health, education, infrastructure, research, and community and social issues. The contributions were received from government agencies, some local councils, regional representative bodies, the higher education sector, the school sector, the business sector and private individuals—a broad cross-section of community and our economy was encompassed.

There were subsequently 15 public hearings at 12 different locations around Australia based on the evidence received. It should be indicated that the hearings were held in most capital cities but also in regional areas in most states, including at Launceston, Ballarat, Victor Harbor, Townsville and Wollongong. We also did some site visits. At Scottsdale in Tasmania we inspected the infrastructure that was part of the stage 1 rollout. We visited the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society based at the University of Melbourne and we visited some other key places, such as NICTA, Google Australia, the Telstra Experience Centre and TwitchTV in Sydney.

It should be indicated, as I said in my foreword, that only very recently we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first commercial mobile telephone becoming available. It caused me to reflect on the last 30 years. I will simply say that I was in the later years of my high school experience at that point in time and I compared that to the experience of my own sons who are in their twenties. We had no computer in the home. There was no such thing as mobile phones available generally. We had one fixed-line phone. And we went to get our pay out from the bank at lunchtime, because that was your only option to get your money if it went into the bank. Indeed, in my part-time job I was responsible for putting pay packets together at Coles, where we had little yellow envelopes and we counted out the notes and coins and popped them into the envelopes. It brings me to consider where indeed the lives of my sons will be in 30 years when they look back at what we currently think of as an advanced use of technology.

Many of the conversations and submissions that we heard during this inquiry went exactly to that issue, about the exponential rate of change that has the capacity to transform our economies, our lives and our societies. I sincerely thank all of those people who very genuinely and extensively participated in the inquiry. I particularly recognise that across many of those areas, as the report indicates, there have been progressions and many new services and products available and utilised. We all know that from our own lives, but many of the witnesses indicated to us that they are now hitting barriers because of the infrastructure. There is a problem with the infrastructure not being uniform and ubiquitous across the nation. There are serious real and new services that they want to explore but they cannot without symmetrical services, higher speed services and so forth. It was a tremendous opportunity to have a look at that.

It should be indicated that we have made 16 recommendations, and those recommendations go to the very issue of: if we want to see the full transformative nature of this sort of very significant infrastructure in the nation, we should be looking at all opportunities to have the demand side—the uptake of that service—expanded. In particular, we go to the role that government can play as a leader in that process. We heard some good international evidence about proactive governments that are actually transforming the uptake and utilisation of modern communications services, and the importance that has to the environmental outcomes, the liveability outcomes of cities and regions and the access and equity issues for people with disabilities, for example. There are a whole lot of very profound, important opportunities there.

I will obviously take the opportunity to have more to say when we hopefully refer this matter to the Main Committee, so I will keep my comments fairly general and brief now. I am disappointed that there is a dissenting report tabled with this report. I have had a minor opportunity this morning to have a look at it. I do not think it intellectually stacks up. I do not think it is consistent, and I think it is a little bit cherry-picking of the evidence. But that is the reality of these processes. It is the sort of report that, when your kids read it 30 years down the track, they may wonder why on earth you put your name to it. But, anyway, it is the call for those involved to put in that report—and I am disappointed that it happened.

I want to particularly take this opportunity in this chamber to thank the secretary of the committee, who did an outstanding job on what was a huge task. I want to thank, in particular, the committee secretariat who are with us today: Julia Morris, Andrew McGowan, James Nelson—though James is not with us—and Tamara Palmer, who did a tremendous job in working with the committee on a very, very large and significant task. Every member of the committee always appreciates the work that the secretariat does, but on this occasion, with such a significant, huge and encompassing task to undertake, I really want to pay tribute to their professionalism and the support they gave to all committee members. I look forward to taking the opportunity to expand on that when I have a chance to talk more broadly on that matter.

I recommend the report to all of those who are interested and look forward to its contribution in broadening the debate on the NBN in our society.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—As the deputy chair of the committee, I would like to speak to the inquiry into the role and potential of the NBN. This was a very large inquiry condensed into a short time. There were 252 submissions, 42 exhibits and 17 supplementary submissions. We went to 15 public hearings in 12 different locations and did three inspections. Those inspections and outreach hearings took us to places as broad as Scottsdale, Launceston, Ballarat, Victor Harbour, Townsville and Wollongong, to say nothing of the capital cities.

It will be no surprise to the House that the coalition members of this committee are ambivalent about the NBN. We made that very clear from the outset. Having said that, it is the role of the government of the day to enact its agenda and we as members of the opposition would want to see that agenda implemented with proper probity and for the best effect for the Australian population. It is in that spirit that I talk about this report. It is not the ideal, in my opinion, on how we should be tackling this matter, but, as I said, we have to go with the government of the day.

Scottsdale was one of the first places in Australia to have the NBN rolled out. It is an interesting vignette of the problems that broadband may contain for us. There are lessons, of course. I am not saying this in any disparaging way, but there are lessons to be learnt from it. For example, 70 per cent of the people agreed to have the free boxes attached to a wall of their home, but, of that 70 per cent, only 15 per cent has connected to a service. Of course, you have to connect to Telstra, Optus or one of the other carriers. The other interesting thing we saw—and there is a lesson in this, whether you call it the NBN or some other model—was that, if you are going to install the free box, you have to think carefully about how you are going to accommodate commercial buildings. We saw examples where the owners of commercial buildings were the major tenant and they would not connect the boxes. Not only did they not have access to the service but, more importantly, their tenants did not. So, at a later stage when they want to retrofit to high-speed broadband, that will come at a cost, and I think that would be unfortunate.

I also want to talk briefly this morning about the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society at Melbourne University. I thank Professor Glyn Davis and his team for a truly outstanding demonstration. It fired me up on the potential of high-speed broadband within the bounds of reality—the sorts of things you could do. For example, we saw a part-robotic and part-remote demonstration of how a surgeon or a professor in Melbourne could direct another surgeon, or even a GP in the case of an emergency, in one of the provincial cities like Ballarat or Bendigo. This involved having 3-D television, high-speed resolution and robotics. It is extraordinary that a doctor in one location could be virtually operating on a person in another location. That was something worth doing.

We then saw a demonstration of how, for example, a trained nurse in a bush nursing centre could examine the inside of a person's mouth—a broken tooth or something like that—in a remote area and connect to a dentist or dental specialist in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne. The specialist could say, 'This is how you will have to treat that for the time being, until we can get the man to a dentist.' In another demonstration, a person who had suffered a stroke could go through their physiotherapy activities on a machine that was linked by broadband to a capital city. We also saw some very high-speed face-to-face conference facilities done on high-speed broadband. The reality was quite unnerving. You would sit at a table barely a metre wide and swear you were talking to people on the other side of the table when they were actually 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 kilometres away. I found that very engaging. It is interesting, however, that when I asked, 'What was the maximum speed that had been employed that day in that demonstration?' the answer is that it was only 20 megabits. I think a lot of nonsense has been spoken. Perhaps we have overblown the requirement for certain speeds. I concede that universities, space technology and certain educational facilities are going to need higher speeds than 20 megabits. Equally, considering that so many people in Australia now are operating on two, three or four megabits, and that the OPEL scheme that the coalition put up at the election before last could have delivered between eight and 12, you really have to wonder why the average person would want to have 100 megabits connected to their home. I might add that that has not been the experience overseas, either.

While I was watching those demonstrations in Melbourne it occurred to me that if we are going to make broadband work, whether it is NBN or any other model, a commensurate amount of education on how to utilise it has to take place not just at the capital city end, not just in the educational and medical institutes or where the high-tech data is being stored and processed, but out in the field. The trained nurse running a bush nursing centre or the doctor in a remote country hospital must have the skills to be able to utilise this broadband. The broadband should not be an end in itself but what it can achieve. If the report does nothing else, for me it is to show me the potential of broadband properly utilised.

I will not go into other aspects of the dissenting report, to which I am a signatory. I will leave that to the member for Bradfield, who is the principal composer of that part of it. I will not steal his thunder. He can speak on that in the Main Committee. I thank the secretary of the committee, Julia Morris, and the inquiry's secretaries, Andrew McGowan and James Nelson, for outstanding work and for great courtesy and patience. What would normally have been a fairly long inquiry was condensed into a short period. It must have been a lot of work for them and I thank and congratulate them on that work.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Does the member for Cunningham wish to move a motion in connection with the report to enable it to be debated on a future occasion?

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the House take note of the report.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for a later hour this day.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communication, I present the committee's report entitled Advisory report on the Navigation Amendment Bill 2011, together with minutes of the proceedings.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—The Navigation Amendment Bill 2011 was referred to the committee by the House Selection Committee. The committee sought submissions from interested parties and held a public hearing to further investigate the bill.

The bill seeks to amendment the Navigation Act to bring Australia in line with the requirements of the Maritime Labour Convention. As a proposed treaty action, the MLC is being considered by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. As part of that inquiry process, the JSCOT heard from various interested parties, including those who were involved in treaty negotiations and who were supportive of Australia's agreement to the treaty, including the development of enabling legislation. The committee heard that those parties, including the Australian Shipowners Association and the Maritime Union of Australia, continue to support the passage of the bill. It also noted that some of the elements of the MLC will be brought into effect through regulations which were not available at the time of the bill's introduction, but the committee has recommended that the Navigation Amendment Bill be passed.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—This Navigation Amendment Bill 2011 that has been referred to the committee is very interesting both from the point of view of the parliament and of the committee. This was one of the first pieces of legislation, certainly in the transport area, that was referred to a committee under the new paradigm, so it brings that Senate overview type of activity into the House of Representatives. This was not a particularly controversial piece of legislation but there were aspects that needed to be looked at, and the committee brought in witnesses who were central to that, including the Department of Infrastructure and Transport, the Maritime Union of Australia, the Australian Shipowners Association et cetera.

There are two aspects to this bill. One is minor, which is to improve tracking services in the southern area of the Great Barrier Reef. That resonates with me personally because the incident that is cited in the bill is that of the Shen Neng 1, which went aground on the southern barrier reef in April 2010. It resonates with me because when it was pulled off the reef it had to be taken into some clear or protected water to be unloaded. It was decided to take it into Hervey Bay. The water mass or the maritime area of Hervey Bay, from the western shores of Fraser Island to the mainland, is in my electorate. Hervey Bay is a pristine environment, with sea grasses and various marine activities, and I, for one, was quite nervous about it. I was given the opportunity to go over the ship in a helicopter while the unloading process was carried out. Thank heavens, it was carried out effectively and without spillage. It emphasised how important the tracking of shipping going through the Barrier Reef is.

Over the years various pilots and captains of vessels have found short cuts. Where people know what they are doing, probably those short cuts are not something we should get terribly excited about. But there are other areas where it is plainly dangerous to go out of the regular channels. That was the suggestion made in relation to the Shen Neng 1. Had that vessel been so damaged that it could not be unloaded, it would have been something quite tragic. That minor amendment in the bill seeks to fix that up.

The other aspect of this bill, as the chairman of the committee has just said, gives effect to an ILO convention, the Maritime Labour Convention. That convention is fairly important, and is recognised by the whole maritime industry as very important, because it consolidates 68 different instruments of the ILO into this one convention.

The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties also had a look at this, and there was a dissenting report built largely around the lack of consultation and another matter referring to whether cadets—being young guys, largely—on vessels share accommodation as part of their initial training. The MUA had some concerns about that. It was agreed that AMSA should look into that. They point out in turn that not every cadet is forced to share. Nevertheless, that one aspect is still up in the air a little. However, the committee has recommended approving this convention. Paragraph 112 of the report says:

The ASA indicates that passage of the Bill and ratification of the MLC will improve protection for workers, benefit shipowners by addressing some areas of competitive disadvantage by levelling standards of employment, and provide certainty to stakeholders that basic social standards can be enforced. The ASA describes its commitment to ratification as ‘unwavering’ and urges ratification at the ‘earliest possible opportunity’.

That is a very good overview and it is supported by the Maritime Union of Australia as well. It is important because, for this convention to take effect, 30 nations have to give assent to it. Fifteen nations have done so far, but Australia has been a bit on the slow side, and all the players in this particular activity leading up to the presentation of this bill have asked that it be expedited. The committee shares that view and the committee puts to the House in its one recommendation that the House of Representatives pass the Navigation Amendment Bill 2011. We commend the report to the House.