Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is the final report of the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network, which was set up shortly before I arrived here. In the months between the coalition losing the 2007 election and then losing absolute control of the numbers in the Senate, they established a number of select committees in order to prosecute a number of issues including this one, the National Broadband Network.

We have had quite a number of iterations of the report and I think, on balance, this is a committee that has done a deal of valuable work. Some of the work has been highly politicised, as this issue obviously is, and that unfortunately has infected some of the work of the committee, but on balance I think everybody who participated in it would agree that it has been a valuable experience. We have taken a lot of evidence over nearly two years from the industry, from community groups and from consumer groups, and that has brought us to where we are today.

I will briefly touch on some of the additional comments the Australian Greens made, which have been published in the report tabled today. Maybe unlike some of the past reports, the final report represents quite a balanced summary of the evidence we heard. We did not have a great deal of time—the extension of time was really only for a month or so—but essentially we set ourselves the task of analysing and critiquing the $25 million consultants’ report into the implementation study. We are actually quite comfortable with the majority’s sole recommendation concerning the public release of the underlying assumptions and calculations that resulted in the implementation study. That is a $25 million piece of work that the government commissioned. It is the only quasi-independent assessment of the business case for the National Broadband Network or for the colossal public investment in the NBN, so we fought quite hard for—and the Senate requested—the minister to put that implementation study into the public domain. For quite a period of time it was not clear whether the minister even intended to table that document, so it was with some relief that we got it. Of course, that tabling occurred on the eve of the last report of this committee, so we supported the extension of time.

We made it quite clear in the committee’s previous reports that we do not subscribe to a view that a cost-benefit analysis will result in an unequivocal answer about the value of the government’s plans for the NBN. It is a bit alarming to see the coalition’s entire case in one sense hinging on the ability of the government or perhaps some consultants, some economists, to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. I think the coalition believes that perhaps this will provide us with a sense of certainty as to whether or not the government’s proposal is going to be value for money. Of course, it will not do any such thing.

But, as our additional comments outline, why not? We had Professor Henry Ergas in the hearings in Canberra a couple of weeks ago tell us it would probably be three days work if he was given the underlying data that was commissioned and put to McKinsey KPMG, the consultants. Then they could probably knock together a cost-benefit analysis within a period of three days, at which point I figure: knock yourself out; let us go ahead and do that as long as the underlying assumptions are transparent and are put into the public domain so that we can see areas of certainty and areas of complete guesswork. In a cost-benefit analysis of a proposal such as this, which involves enormous public investment, some of the costs are relatively easy to define, but estimating and monetising the public benefits or the public good of bringing rapid broadband to virtually the entire country, I would argue, are extraordinarily difficult to estimate and then monetise. If you go to the trouble of doing that work and then come across the final dollar figure that says this is what the NBN will be worth, you would want to be very careful about how much reliance you put and how much you rest your argument and your case on whatever number fell out of that analysis.

In our contributions to the committee’s previous reports, we raised the issue of the geographic and socioeconomic digital divide and the importance of building bridges across that divide. During the most recent round of submissions and hearings, some very interesting comment was made on the ubiquity of online services, which is of course relevant to this issue. We are hearing quite similar things in the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety about the ubiquity of social networking, particularly as it applies to young people, and that these systems already are gaining the status of an essential service, certainly in some parts of the country and in some subcultures.

According to ACCAN—the consumer protection network that was established by the Australian government—in the context of endorsing the implementation study’s recommendation relating to the universal service obligation and that that be reviewed, we are already well on our way towards ubiquity. It pointed out that online services were already a practical necessity in everyday life because there are so many basic transactions that are exclusively or preferentially performed online. Access to the internet is already a matter of social inclusion. We are going to see, as this debate progresses, as the NBN rolls out and as services become more and more ubiquitous, that being used as an argument for closing public libraries, for closing postal services, for taking free-to-air broadcasters offline and so on. As services move into the online environment, that sense of ubiquity is going to become more and more important, given that somewhat more than 20 per cent of Australian households do not have a computer. We are not even talking about what kind of connection speeds they have; they do not have a computer. We should not necessarily be forcing people to receive government services and entertainment, health care, education and so on through a system unless we are certain that we have brought everybody with us.

The NT Minister for Information, Communications and Technology Policy urged the government to pursue ubiquity to make the NBN a truly visionary and transformational national building initiative. In that case, they cautioned against the implementation study’s cost-saving recommendation that premises only be connected to the NBN on demand. Their comment was:

The fundamental value proposition of the NBN is not so much its speed, although that is important, but its potential ubiquity to connect 25-30 per cent of homes that are not internet connected and enable a whole range of services including some government services to be delivered to householders regardless of whether they have subscribed to retail broadband service or not.

Speaking to some of the local government authorities who were in the building yesterday from the Pilbara, Port Hedland and from the Shire of Roebourne, their communities, which are some of the most important economic powerhouses in the country, are still getting by on dial-up and still getting by on wireless and that services to some of these townships, which are large and quite substantial, are still basically substandard. These are economies and regional communities that are going to desperately need to diversify their economies to reduce their reliance on mining, oil and gas, and non-renewable resources. The Australian Greens believe that providing ubiquitous rapid telecommunications services is one quite important way of doing that because it links people not just to the rest of the Australian economy and to Australian society but to the rest of the planet as well.

We need to be very careful about how we move forward. Unfortunately, we have not had as much time as I probably would have liked in the work of this committee to discuss that end-user side of what people would—