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

I rise to take note of answers given in question time today by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy—in particular, the minister’s failure to convince the Senate and the Australian people of the government’s capacity to deliver on its $43 billion promise to build a National Broadband Network. After all, why should we doubt Minister Conroy’s say so? Why should we and the Australian people doubt it, when all that the Rudd Labor government has done so far is bungle their spending programs? NBN round 1, worth some $4.7 billion—abandoned; $30 million wasted on a bungled tender process, $17 million of it from the public purse and $13 million of it from the private purse. NBN round 1: abandoned.

Then we have $2.7 billion spent on the home insulation program, which Minister Garrett, until last Friday, hailed as a success. Of course, last Friday Minister Garrett suspended the supposedly successful program. The home insulation program—HIP—becomes decidedly un-hip: $2.7 billion on a now-suspended home insulation program. It was decidedly un-hip expenditure of Australian taxpayers’ money. And there was the $175 million proposed for the Green Loans Program. The Green Loans Program was rewritten.

So why should Australians have gained any confidence from Minister Conroy’s answers in this place today as to the government’s capacity to deliver on the $43 billion National Broadband Network, when NBN round 1, worth $4.7 billion, was abandoned; $2.7 billion on the home insulation program was suspended; and the $175 million Green Loans Program was rewritten? How on earth are the Australian people expected to have any confidence that the government will deliver on a $43 billion taxpayer spend? That is particularly so when, as Senator Macdonald reminded us, in estimates Senator Conroy failed to tell the Australian people that the government will release and make public the much-awaited implementation study for the National Broadband Network—the implementation study to which Minister Conroy has shot home the answers to life, the universe and everything.

Who is going to get what? When are they going to get it? How are they going to get it? How much will they have to pay for it? And now, what confidence can the Australian people have that the technology, once delivered, will not be outdated? After all, the recent results from Telstra show that Australians are moving more quickly than even Telstra could anticipate from fixed-line services and fixed-line broadband to something else. And yet we have a proposal from the government that no, in about eight to 10 years time they will deliver fixed broadband, in the main, when the rest of the world, including Australians, are voting with their hard lines and going mobile. As Alan Kohler said:

Telstra’s revenue from its copper network is collapsing faster than anyone expected, and faster than the company can make up …

Simon Molloy, analyst, commented in the Australian Financial Review last Friday:

You never know where the turning points are until they’ve gone past.

           …         …         …

Communications users are voting with their dollars for mobility.

That means wireless.

So, Minister, please commit to making the implementation study public, for the sake of the Australian people’s belief in this government’s capacity to deliver anything substantial with respect to their promised $43 billion National Broadband Network, particularly in the face of the aborting of NBN round 1 and the suspension of the so-called home insulation program. (Time expired)