Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi asks: ‘How many friends has Senator Conroy got?’ That depends on whether or not the deal with Senator Carr is still holding. He likes to count all of these things, but the thing is that we are counting too. We are counting the chapters of failure mounting up in the government’s broadband proposals. They went to the last election with a plan. They did not have policies in every area. In fact, they were sorely lacking in many areas, but they actually had a policy when it came to broadband. They had their fibre-to-the-node policy. They were going to roll out, for $4.7 billion, coverage to 98 per cent of Australian homes. This was the great promise that, close to three years ago, the now Prime Minister and the now Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy stood there and staked their credibility on—the fact that this was how they were going to fix broadband services for all Australians.

Instead, what did we get? We got a government that came in and spent tens of millions of dollars on consultants and an assessment process only to realise that they had to ditch that process because their promise could not be delivered. It was not feasible; it did not stack up. The government had not done their sums correctly. Rather than doing what any responsible or sensible government would do and going back to basics and thinking about the right telecommunications regulatory environment and the right sort of outcome, the government decided to say, ‘Double or nothing.’ In fact, it is not double; it is 10 times the amount. The original figure, $4.7 billion, has become $43 billion. Yet, quite miraculously, whilst the government are proposing expenditure of almost 10 times the amount, their new fibre-to-the-home network is now only proposed to cover 90 per cent of Australians. Rather than the grand 98 per cent, it is back down to 90 per cent. You have to wonder what the government are focusing on.

Now the government are coming in and talking about forcibly breaking up and structurally separating one of Australia’s largest companies, Telstra. I feel like I have stepped back to some time in the previous century, to a trust-busting debate or, perhaps even more relevantly, a nationalisation debate. We all know the hidden agenda for the government behind all of this. They know that, even with their $43 billion, they still cannot manage to get their broadband mark 2 plan to work without forcing Telstra to part with large chunks of its current infrastructure to the government’s company. The government claim Telstra’s structural separation will then provide for a more competitive telecommunications environment. If we are going to have that more competitive environment for investment in telecommunications, why on earth did the government think that they still needed to go ahead with establishing a government company, NBN Co? It is $43 billion of investment when they are already forking out, at an amazing rate every single day, thousands of dollars that they do not have for executives to build something that they are not currently building.

The policies of the government are all skew-whiff when it comes to broadband. Their focus has been on picking technological winners. They have chosen fixed fibre as the lucky one when mounting evidence to the contrary says that they are not on a winner at all. Hundreds of thousands of Australians every month are making the switch to wireless options. The private sector is making a massive new investment in wireless options. The government’s solution, though, is to take the biggest company in the sector and ban it from making new investment in wireless. Like everything else on broadband, their policy makes no sense.