Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, talk about fake news! Who knew that this Labor government would introduce its own misinformation bill—in fact, their second attempt—yet be here in this debate spreading misinformation about some alleged secret plan, which nobody on this side of the House even knows about, for the NBN to be privatised? How ironic!

The amendments in the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill 2024 are amendments to the Labor Party's own legislation, introduced on 25 November 2010, when the current Prime Minister was in cabinet as the then infrastructure minister. He introduced the bill, saying:

It … sets out arrangements for the eventual sale of the Commonwealth's stake in the company once the NBN rollout is complete, including provisions for independent and parliamentary reviews prior to any privatisation, and for the parliament to have the final say on the sale.

So there it is: Labor set up the NBN for privatisation, not the coalition, as is now being asserted in this debate. This is an attempt at wedge politics, but Labor have ended up wedging themselves.

Days earlier, the then communications minister, Stephen Conroy, had confirmed privatisation was on the agenda and highlighted that rural and regional areas would need to be front and centre of the sale. This is the same former communications minister who only months earlier in 2010, with pomp and ceremony, had come to my home town in my electorate of Mallee and declared Mildura to be the first place in the nation to switch off analog television and switch on digital television. That was a great announcement. However, on 1 July this year, Mildura had the indignity of being the first to switch off digital television. So maybe Labor are wary that their 14-year itches are starting to scratch. Having let down rural and regional Australians in my electorate at the 14-year mark, maybe they realise they need to protect rural and regional Australia from themselves and add extra safeguards to prevent the sale of the NBN. Who knows?

In my electorate of Mallee, I am pleased to say, a new NBN presence is being established in Sea Lake. I know local constituents have been waiting patiently for that, and, hopefully, it will come online in December. Robert Graham is one of those in Sea Lake, and he says: 'An NBN rollout is great once it is live because it brings the rest of us in line with the rest of the country. It opens us up to do the things we have not been able to do. At the moment we are on ADSL Sky Muster and if you use that you have a latency issue, whereas the fibre removes our latency issues. If you are on ADSL, you are bandwidth restricted, but fibre opens up the restrictions which mean things like telehealth and downloading and streaming all become a viable option.' I might say that most Australians can enjoy those services —I won't even call them privileges. Health care is a service. I note that the local progress association, Advance Sea Lake Inc., are looking forward to that service being upgraded. I also understand, after advocating for local residents, that the transition from satellite to fixed wireless in Woorinen South will begin in the second half of 2025.

I am currently investigating NBN outages at Murtoa that a local resident complained about at a recent stall I ran at Murtoa's Big Weekend. My constituent says these outages happen without warning—a bit like power, really. But as I discussed recently with the NBN representative, this may come down to a retailer's failure to act on warnings that the NBN, as a wholesaler, provides to them. This is probably a sticking point with the NBN that many consumers don't understand—that their choice of retailer may be having an impact on their awareness of NBN outages. Of course, if the outages weren't happening in the first place there would be less cause for consternation.

Under the watch of this Prime Minister and the communications minister, Labor have overseen a major decline in the NBN, and maybe Australians aren't aware of this. They have hammered Australians with massive NBN price increases. We have seen six million families smashed by NBN price rises of up to 14 per cent since October last year. Australians were dealt with a double whammy of higher internet costs, with two price hikes in the space of just eight months since the Albanese government backed a new pricing deal for NBN last year. And what did the Minister for Communications say? Infamously, she described this price rise as 'great news for consumers'. I'm not sure how you work that out.

Under Labor, the satellite business is collapsing. Two years ago, the NBN had more than 120,000 satellite customers, and Starlink had virtually none. Today, the NBN is down to 85,000 satellite customers and Starlink has more than 270,000. I might be one of them. The government response was to convene a roundtable meeting. This government have never met a roundtable they didn't like. Over the same time period, the NBN's brownfields business—meaning existing homes—has almost 100,000 customers, and at the same time the NBN's cash losses have blown out. For the most recent financial year, its net cash flow was minus $1.4 billion to $300 million, worse than the minus $1.1 billion result in the previous year.

It is intriguing that Labor are so determined to keep the NBN in public hands, and I emphasise again we on this side are not talking about changing that position. But when it comes to nuclear energy, Labor opposes our plan for seven publicly owned nuclear power plants at existing coal-fired power plant sites across Australia. Labor have instead gone to a Labor-dominated inquiry here in parliament into the prospects for nuclear energy in Australia but that inquiry on this bill tell you it is Labor who have thrown positivity out of the window. We know their election slogan, thanks to the pomp and ceremony in Adelaide at the weekend—building Australia's future. The future, according to Labor, will be built on fear—fear about nuclear energy, fear of phantom privatisations. That is Labor's positive vision for the future. When you campaign on fear, what you are doing is demonstrating how small your vision for the future is. You pull down your opponent with fear tactics so nobody notices how small your vision really is. We now have a government more focused on countering the opposition's policies—governing from opposition, if you like—rather than their own. They are so desperate they have dusted off the old chestnut of going a step towards university education being free. That is what their thought bubble of 20 per cent debt forgiveness for HELP debt means—you are one-fifth of the way to your university education being free.

Many constituents who are old enough to remember say this Albanese government is worse than Whitlam's, and they are right. Now Labor are diving 50 years back into the history books for other ideas to out-Whitlam Whitlam. I remind those opposite that the Whitlam government was a one-term government. Be careful where you take inspiration from.

Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking today on this bill, the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill 2024. I am very pleased because it is vital that the NBN stays in public hands. We are very much committed to do that. This bill will amend the National Broadband Network Companies Act 2011 to ensure ongoing public ownership of the NBN. The bill incorporates new wording to make it clear that the NBN is to be preserved in public ownership as an explicit requirement, and that's what's important about this bill.

We, the Albanese Labor government, have made a rock-solid commitment to keeping the NBN in public ownership. Of course, the fibre and fixed-wireless upgrades we took to the 2022 election are being delivered on time and on budget, which is effectively a first for any government in terms of how we are rolling out those improvements. Australians are now taking up fibre upgrades in record numbers, and this is vitally important. It leads to a much better user experience and customer experience, and less fault as well. There's a lot of innovation happening, particularly in terms of satellite technology, which really does have the ability to transform connectivity for all Australians.

In regional and rural areas like mine, especially, issues surrounding the upgrading of the NBN are at the forefront of the minds of so many people. There are so many reasons we require that. For the vast number of wonderful small businesses that we have in my region and in other parts of regional Australia, having connectivity is at the heart of them functioning as a small business. Of course, we need that connectivity for educational purposes as well. For so many years under the coalition we didn't have that. It meant so many businesses struggled. It meant many people couldn't access those educational resources.

People need access to the NBN for personal reasons, and we desperately need to have access to connectivity in times of natural disasters. In my region we had the devastating floods of 2022 when all technology wasn't available. It was an incredibly difficult time. We've made some major investments since that time, in terms of having equipment and technology there for increased connectivity during natural disasters. That is absolutely important. Our government understands that we need to do all that we can to ensure we can access that technology in times of a natural disaster because problems with connectivity added to the incredible distress and devastation that we were feeling during the floods of 2022. We have made a commitment to making sure that there is more capacity for connectivity when we are in natural disasters.

We have said many times that we strongly believe the NBN needs to stay in full government ownership, to support that ongoing upgrade to the network and also—very importantly—to ensure the ongoing regulatory oversight of NBN wholesale pricing to keep broadband affordable for Australians. That will only happen if we ensure that it remains within public ownership.

Having access, particularly affordable access, to the NBN is incredibly important for a whole host of reasons, as I mentioned earlier. We want to make sure that stays in place. It is also essential to deliver the strategy for a greater and more connected Australia, including rolling out more fibre in the fixed line network, planning for the transition to next-generation satellites and modernising universal service obligations. There are a whole variety of reasons why we need to ensure that NBN ownership stays in public hands and to ensure that happens effectively and efficiently.

Our cybersecurity and national security imperatives naturally require a massive government oversight as well, and that can only be done through government ownership. We've said we wouldn't support any future sale of NBN, particularly if it were to involve some sort of foreign ownership. That could potentially raise very serious national sovereignty and security risks. So there are a whole host of reasons why the NBN should remain within public hands.

As I've said, the NBN is critical national infrastructure, and we have maintained it. We need to have it in place. That's why we introduced that. Many years ago, we knew how important it was to roll that out so that people could have access to the NBN. It was established by a Labor government because of the failure of a former Liberal-National government to foresee a plan for the digital transformation of the economy. You do have to plan well in advance for what is required to transform our economy—particularly for those regional and rural areas that continue to rely on the NBN for important day-to-day activities and business activities—and, more broadly, to provide that security and service during natural disasters.

We know that the sale of Telstra under the then Howard government was a complete disaster, and it really showed how the Liberal Party and particularly the National Party sold out many regional communities. There were initially some guarantees of service delivery, and none of that eventuated—none of it. People remind me of that every day. They remember when it was sold off by the Howard government and the implications for the regions.

Debate interrupted.