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

I am very pleased to rise to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Submarine Cable Protection) Bill 2013. It is a privilege to follow the member for Moreton, who treated us to a discursive display of views about a range of matters only extremely peripherally related to the subject of this bill. In fact, he took us through a nest of non sequiturs, an isthmus of irrelevance.

This afternoon's bill is, in fact, about the regulatory regime dealing with submarine cabling. It is true that there is, if you draw a very, very long bow, some connection between broadband networks and submarine cables. There is a connection in this sense—a broadband network of the kind which is presently being built, a national broadband network, is principally an access network, whereas a submarine cable that extends between Australia and other places, such as the United States, is used to carry all kinds of data and voice traffic. Indeed, fascinatingly, this has occurred for more than 100 years. Submarine cables have been in existence for well over 100 years.

The member for Moreton told us about gaming. He told us about a range of other matters. Indeed, when the shadow minister spoke he was at pains to try to relate this debate to the question of the National Broadband Network. He said, for example: 'There have been problems with the construction of the National Broadband Network. That is not good enough; it needs to be fixed. But we should not stop building it.' He says that as if in some way there could be a difference drawn between the particular mode of construction which the previous government was adopting and the core construction performance. Apparently, you can sort that out, it is an easy thing to do and you should just keep doing it. The whole point is that it is not an easy thing to do. It is a very complex job. It is a job that we are now, fortunately for the people of Australia, on the case about.

I want to turn to the actual matters which are the subject of the bill before the House this afternoon. There are three specific things that this bill will do by making amendments to the submarine cable protection regime set out in schedule 3A of the Telecommunications Act. The first is to ensure consistency between the cable protection regime and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The second is to provide a clearer consultation process between the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the Attorney-General's Department on submarine cable installation permit applications. The third is to enable significant domestic submarine cables to be brought under the regime and to be suitably protected under the regime. That is what the bill does. There is, at best, an indirect connection between the matters the subject of this bill and the matters that we heard about from the member for Moreton and the member for Blaxland.

In the time available to me this afternoon, I want to make three brief points. The first is that submarine cables are of critical importance. They are of critical importance ultimately in the end-to-end voice telephony and broadband services that are delivered to end users. The second is that significant risks face the operators of submarine cables. The third is that there are important measures in this bill which will facilitate the rollout of submarine cables to make an inherently risky business slightly less risky.

Let us turn to the proposition that submarine cables are of critical importance. Madam Speaker, may I parenthetically take this opportunity to congratulate you on your elevation to the high office that you now hold, this being the first opportunity I have had to do so.

It is no surprise that Australia, as an island nation, is extremely dependent on submarine cables. Submarine cables connect our country with the rest of the world and form an important part of Australia's telecommunications infrastructure. Modern submarine cables allow for the transfer of vast amounts of data and they carry the vast bulk of Australia's international data and voice traffic. It follows from that that if there is damage to cables—if there is service disruption to cables—it can have a very significant economic impact. It is for this reason that the Australian government in 2005 established a regime for the protection of nationally significant submarine cables connecting Australia to other countries. Indeed, that regime has been praised by organisations as diverse as the International Cable Protection Committee and APEC as a global best practice approach to the protection of submarine cables.

It is worth making the point that submarine cables have been around for a very long time. Initially, they were used for the purpose of supporting telegraph traffic. The first submarine telegraph cables were laid across the English Channel in 1851 and then across the Atlantic Ocean in 1866. Australia received its first submarine cable connection quite early, in 1872, through the Java to Port Darwin telegraph link. This in turn led to a connection to the southern capitals via the iconic Overland Telegraph Line, which was built by Charles Todd. There is another important Australian connection with submarine cables. In Australia for a number of years the No. 2 telco, Optus, was owned by the British company Cable & Wireless, which for over 100 years had been one of the world's great submarine cable owning companies, albeit its role in that field is much reduced today. The origins of Cable & Wireless date back to the 1860s. The company was founded by Sir John Pender, the Manchester cotton merchant, who was the financier of the Great Eastern, the ship which laid the successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866. The company enjoyed a near monopoly on international communications for many years, embracing over 50 telegraph, radio and telecom companies. To take one example, in 1901 the Eastern Telegraph Company, which was a predecessor of Cable & Wireless, had an international communications network of around 150,000 kilometres of undersea cables.

If we take the story forward over 100 years, around the turn of this century there was a boom in the cable construction business, with companies like Global Crossing established to build-out traditional submarine cables. Indeed, Cable & Wireless was also pursuing at that time a focus on building internet backbones around the world, including backbones running through submarine cables. There was a view around the telecommunications industry at the time that internet demand was going to expand without limit. So the business strategy of building out cables was apparently guaranteed to succeed. With so many new cables being constructed at the time it turned out that, despite the best expectations of those who were putting money into this field, the boom was not a sustainable one and many of the cable owning companies went into bankruptcy. Global Crossing went bankrupt and Cable & Wireless saw its shares drop from five pounds in early 2000 to 34 pence a couple of years later.

There is a nexus between submarine cables and the end-to-end broadband service which is delivered to Australians. It is not the matters that were being discussed by the members for Moreton and Blaxland. The submarine cable issue has nothing to do with the access network, which is the subject of the National Broadband Network, that those two members were incorrectly speaking about in their contributions on this debate. There is a connection, because it is the end-to-end connectivity which ultimately determines the customer experience of the person connected to the network. Notwithstanding all the rhetoric from the former Labor government about the National Broadband Network, they had very little to say about another potential bottleneck, which is of course the submarine cable. When so much traffic is travelling across the Pacific from Australia to the United States in particular, if there is a bottleneck at that point, the end-to-end experience is likely to be a constrained one.

Madam Speaker, I feel confident that you and my parliamentary colleagues share a strong interest in the details of the submarine cable industry. I could go on for some time, but I have been encouraged to digitally compress my remarks. I am very pleased to digitally compress my remarks by making the point that the measures in this bill will facilitate the rollout of submarine cables by, in some important ways, reducing the risk which is faced by operators in this vital industry. I am therefore very pleased to commend this bill to the House.

Debate interrupted.