Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I would also like to make a few brief comments on the third report of the Select Committee on the National Broadband Network and look forward to some of my colleagues on the committee doing likewise. It is with much pleasure that I rise to speak to the report. The committee has, as I said earlier, been very constructive and apolitical in approaching what could have been a rather different exercise in having a look at one of the most ambitious infrastructure spends this country is now looking forward to.

In the process of delivering the third report and the work done of the committee thus far, on behalf of all committee members I want to thank very much the secretary of the committee, Alison Kelly. Alison is a professional who has dedicated a lot of professional passion to this report and to this inquiry, so much so that the poor girl—she cannot get over it; she is very tragic—is up there in the gallery today and has been for quite some time, looking on patiently waiting to see the report being handed down. Her passion has not stopped her being ever patient, particularly with this committee. I also want to thank, on behalf of the committee, others who have assisted Alison on the way through, those being Nina Boughey, Veronica Gover, Kyriaki Mechanicos, Meredith Bond, Claire Guest, Cassimah Mackay and Christine Tieu. Thank you to all. Thank you also, of course, to stakeholders and other interested parties who have contributed the some 102 submissions received by the committee during its inquiry thus far and the witnesses who have appeared at its 14 hearings thus far.

The government’s National Broadband Network round 1, if you like, was characterised very much by questions about which Australians were going to get what, when they were going to get it, how much it was going to cost taxpayers to provide it, how much consumers were going to have to pay for the services they were going to get, when they would get it and how they get would it. Subsequent to that, some months later, the Rudd Labor government unrolled a tenfold ‘spend’ to roll out a National Broadband Network, a promise of fibre to the home and a promise of speeds of up to 100 megabits per second at an infrastructure investment of some $43 billion. That was tenfold on the round 1, if you like, promise of $4.7 billion.

However, with the bigger promise come bigger questions. Much the same questions remain, but the answers to them are potentially much greater. Who is to be included, as I said earlier, in the nine per cent of Australians who will get fibre to the home and the 10 per cent of Australians who will get something else? Rural and regional Australia in particular are still grappling with working out what they will get, when they will get it and how they will get it, and they are struggling to see how they will have equivalent access to equivalent speed and equivalent services with a $43 billion National Broadband Network spend.

It seems that with the greater spend comes less transparency. The recently tabled Productivity Commission report said that the decision to build a National Broadband Network, although endorsed by Infrastructure Australia, was not based on a detailed cost benefit analysis, and, in regard to the framework used for assessing major infrastructure, the report said that the guidelines have not been universally applied. I have already talked about the continued deferral of issues such as this to the implementation study, but here we are at the end of some two years after the election of the Rudd government and with the expenditure thus far of about $100 million of the $43 billion projected spend yet the government has not delivered one extra megabit of speed or one additional user under its National Broadband Network policy. So this committee remains with a very important job to do. I am very pleased that the Senate has chosen to allow the committee to continue to do this job in respect of the very important components that we look forward to being answered as part of the finalisation of the implementation study and the government’s response to it. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to the third report. I know some colleagues have comments to contribute.