Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications. Will the minister outline the status of the Interim Satellite Service established by the former government to serve the bush?

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

I thank the honourable member for his question. As he knows very well, there are many Australians in regional and remote areas for whom fixed-line broadband services are simply not practical and a satellite service is the solution. There is a real role for government to play in providing that. Under the Howard government, the Australian Broadband Guarantee provided just that. It provided an equipment subsidy. So it did not come as a surprise, I suppose, that in 2010, ahead of the final long-term satellite solution of the NBN, the Labor government announced that it was spending $351 million on an interim satellite solution.

This is probably the worst example of misspent and mismanaged funds in the whole NBN saga. At the outset, Senator Conroy said that there were 165,000 premises eligible, but he did not buy sufficient services to enable 165,000 premises to get a service. In fact, he only bought 48,000 services. So he promised it to 165,000 but could only get 48,000. And then—in what can only be described as the Labor government's departure from the real world of Australia and entry into its own fantasy world of Conrovia—at the beginning of 2013, in a press release, the NBN Co announced that the number of eligible customers for the broadband satellite had increased to 250,000, so it had gone up. They had changed the eligibility, but of course nothing had been done to improve the service.

The tragedy of this is that not only are there tens of thousands of people who cannot get the service but were told they could; the quality of the service is now little better than dial-up. Under the old Broadband Guarantee, we required ISPs to ensure that people got 65 per cent of their peak speed 80 per cent of the time. No such guarantee was given and no such restriction or rule was made, and as a consequence of that we now have the situation where the 48,000 lucky people who got the service are getting a far inferior service to what they got under the Howard government Australian Broadband Guarantee—three times the subsidy, Labor spent on this, and for a fraction of the service level.