Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Science and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to take note of answers to questions asked of Senator Coonan today. I believe that those people in voter land who watched question time and heard the responses of the minister to the questions put to her will be desperately disappointed and quite worried that the future of telecommunications infrastructure and the decisions about how things are to be pursued are in her hands. It seems that Australia is missing the boat. While countries all around the world are recognising that their national telecommunications infrastructure is vital to their national interests, both social and economic, the government here has completely lost the plot.

We saw Senator Coonan the other evening on The 7.30 Report making the ludicrous claim that no Australian is unhappy with broadband access in Australia. I looked at the Yahoo!7 website before I came to question time today and, at that stage, there were over 2,700 responses to a poll and 67 per cent of voters said that they were not happy with available broadband internet speeds, and I can understand why. My experience of living an hour down the road is of a ludicrous internet service, and I have spoken about it here on many occasions. The fact is that if you are just a little outside of a main centre you cannot access a broadband service at all.

Australia needs something that is much more reliable and much more appropriate to the 21st century. We need a fibre-to-the-node network if we are to ensure our future prosperity, but the Prime Minister and Senator Coonan mistakenly believe that copper is the answer for Australia. We are up the creek without a paddle at this stage, and we are being outdone all around the world. Our competitors like Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and the US have moved towards fibre optics, but what has happened in downtown Australia? Nothing. A significant section of the existing copper based infrastructure in Australia resides in areas where it will not be economically viable to upgrade to a fibre based information highway. There is only the government to take leadership on this issue, and that is what we are not seeing from the minister or from the Howard government. Once again, they are failing Australians everywhere, especially in regional Australia.

What are the messages that are coming from the market? First of all, Telstra today reported its worst annual result since the government sold out Australia and sold off Telstra nine years ago. Today we heard that Telstra’s annual net profit fell 26 per cent from $4.3 billion to $3.18 billion. It fell by $1 billion. Yesterday Telstra announced that it was pulling out of its $4 billion fibre network rollout. What is the result of all of this incompetence from the Howard government? Today we hear that members of the government themselves are calling for Telstra’s CEO, Sol Trujillo, to be sacked because he does not have the right attitude to the government, or, to put it another way, he will not do the government’s bidding. It is a very depressing state of affairs.

I asked Senator Coonan about the Telstra payphone at the Wollongong TAFE college. I understand that perhaps Senator Coonan has not actually been to the Wollongong TAFE campus. It is a very sprawling campus. It is very dark at night and there are very serious issues about people having access to payphones, and that same issue translates to universities, school campuses and other tourist places, which are the places that Telstra has targeted its removal of payphones. The real reason is, as Telstra itself says, that its payphone business now loses about $30 million a year—that is, about 55 per cent of the telco’s 30,000 payphones lose money. That is what it is about; it is about Telstra saving money, and the universal service obligation can be damned.