Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a complete embarrassment! This debate on taking note of answers was opened by Senator Conroy, a man who is reported in The Latham Diaries as having said, when offered the shadow ministry for telecommunications: ‘I don’t know anything about communications and I couldn’t care less.’ Isn’t that entirely typical of the way in which the Labor Party have approached this matter of communications? They have done it on the basis of putting someone in the shadow portfolio who knows nothing about it and cares less, and isn’t that apparent in the development of the Australian Labor Party’s policy towards communications?

For the 13 years that the Labor Party was in government, there was an abject failure to address the issues that Australians needed addressing in relation to telecommunications. We had a quiet and comfortable telecommunications duopoly between Telstra and Optus, about which the Labor government of the time failed to do anything at all. Labor did nothing to plan for the introduction of digital television and radio to Australia. It did nothing to fix failures in relation to services in country areas. It did nothing about the development of pay television. Australia was one of the last industrialised countries to acquire pay television. The Labor government prevented people in regional and rural areas from getting access to increased radio services in various ways. There was about as much development of telecommunications policy during 13 years of Labor as there was development in the science of astronomy during the early Middle Ages, and that is precisely where Labor remains at the moment.

Senator Stephens happily drew attention to the alleged failure of this government to do anything about the development of telecommunications services and alleged that we had actually ‘lost the plot’. Perhaps the other countries would not be as far advanced as she alleges they are if it were not for the fact that we lost so much time in the development of telecommunications in this country as a consequence of the Labor Party failing to deal with the issues that should have been dealt with in 13 years of government. We have been left with a situation where we have to play catch-up.

The government since 1996 has done a remarkable job in trying to redress the failures of that early period. It has tried to introduce a telecommunications regime for Australia that brings us to a position where we are getting closer than we have ever been to the standards that apply elsewhere in the world. The Labor Party fails continually and is yet to provide us with a credible policy that will see the continuation of that policy when and if it ever returns to government—one hopes that is never. By contrast, in the period we have been in government I think we have made remarkable progress in developing a significant telecommunications regime in this country. We now have nine or so competitors in the marketplace, all seeking to provide services to Australians. They have provided infrastructure—ADSL 2, for example—with speeds of up to 19 megabits per second. Four hundred data service lines have been installed, with a promise of 500 new data service lines in the future. High-speed cable networks are being developed.

My colleague Senator Adams made reference to criticism that the Telstra network would only serve the capital cities, raising the question of what would happen to the rest of Australia—that is, the provincial, rural and country areas—and suggesting that it was going to be left out in Telstra’s proposal. We have a regime now that promises in the not too distant future to address these failings and provide the services that Australians desperately need and are anxious to use for business and personal purposes. In addition to that we have a much more effective competition regime. We have a much more deregulatory regime; this is essential to telecommunications, where the technology is changing rapidly, where there is necessary oversight from a regulator and where there is a need to sometimes address the bottlenecks. (Time expired)