Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I am at a loss as to why the opposition are not supporting this amendment. Even Senator Birmingham, at the beginning of his comments, claimed that there is a universal objective here, which is the ‘availability of accessible and affordable carriage services that enhance the welfare of Australians’. The opposition are claiming that they want more. I will address their arguments, but there is absolutely no reason why the opposition could not support this amendment put forward by the Greens; it is a sentiment and object of this bill that there is complete understanding and support for.

The amendment goes to the very heart of the NBN policy, in many respects, and I would like to challenge the opposition on the fairly shallow rhetoric surrounding what they claim is the creation of a new government monopoly. Far from it. What we are talking about with the National Broadband Network is an open-access wholesale-only fibre-to-the-premises network that addresses the issue of residual monopolies in the telecommunications market by structurally separating the wholesale and retail arms. This has the effect of removing the residual monopoly that existed at the retail level which was, as my Senate colleagues are well aware, perpetuated by the mishandling of telecommunications policy under the former government.

We saw for many years the former Howard government seek to perpetuate Telstra’s residual monopoly in the telecommunications market—for a very shallow political purpose. That was to ensure that their bottom line stayed healthy enough to take a public sale of Telstra’s shares, a privatisation, to the market. We know that the reason we got into a mess with telecommunications and had one of the highest prices for broadband in the OECD was this mishandling. The coalition were prepared to put their singular policy objective of maximising the return for the Telstra privatisation before the social and economic requirements of a nation heading into the 21st century, needing that economic infrastructure to build the industries and create the jobs of the future.

There is no more negligent approach to this area of policy—I make that point very strongly today. All senators, most of whom were not in the parliament when we had some of the most deplorable telecommunications policy under the former government, need to understand these facts. For them to come in here and talk about the National Broadband Network as somehow being the creation of a new monopoly means they have no appreciation of the recent history of telecommunications policy in this country. It exposes their lack of understanding about the structure of the telecommunications industry, the dynamic that exists between the wholesale and retail arms of the industry and how that dynamic rightly sits at the heart of the National Broadband Network policy and this bill.

As we on this side have been saying throughout the second reading debate and in many other debates, the National Broadband Network, and this bill, will fix the structure of the telecommunications industry and allow competition to thrive at the retail level. This is done by addressing the place that Telstra occupies in the market and acknowledging the arrangement that exists between NBN Co. and Telstra in relation to the structure of the market. Their lack of basic understanding has been further exposed as senator after senator from the opposition has come in here and continually resorted to shallow rhetoric about the creation of a new monopoly. I have said this many times—the NBN Co. and the structural model for telecommunications, as outlined in the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2010, resolve all of those problems.

I and many of my Senate colleagues on all sides of politics have been receiving complaints and hearing the frustrations of the citizens of Australia about internet services for well over a decade. I know that even before I was elected in 1996 there was significant frustration amongst consumers of internet services in both the residential market and the business market—in the small and the large business sector—because of Telstra’s exorbitant pricing of higher bandwidth products. Those of you who are as old as I am would probably remember the 64-kilobit ISDN connections for which Telstra charged corporate clients $30,000-plus a year. That is the residual monopoly, the exploitation of the market, that the National Broadband Network policy and the structural issues contained in this bill finally resolve.

This policy also creates the opportunity for a healthy service provider market to thrive on the back of a suitably robust national fibre network. The opposition are fond of promoting the virtues of wireless broadband. They come in here and say that there is no proof that we need a fibre network. Well, the science on the technology is in, and it shows that what we need most is a wholesale fibre network, a National Broadband Network, that has the capacity to be future-proofed. That is about making an investment now in the technology that will see us through, as far as we can predict the future. That is pretty impressive. For the record, once again, the technology of the fibre network is so strong that you can upgrade it at either end to get more capacity. We know and the opposition knows that upgrading a national fibre network is about upgrading what is at the end of the fibre. This is the big investment and it will not require another bill.

It is also important to challenge the opposition’s assertion that somehow we do not need to make this investment now, that we need to do more study. We do need to make this investment now—we know the market was incapable of doing so. The opposition is very conveniently forgetting the lengths that the government went to to test the market, to see if the market was capable of responding to the challenge of investing in a national fibre network. Let me remind everybody that the market failed. It failed for a range of reasons but, most of all, for the same reason it failed previously: the structure of the telecommunications market in Australia did not permit any of those companies to make an investment of the magnitude that would render it future-proof and serve the policy needs and objectives of the National Broadband Network policy. Just to be sure, this government tested the market. Through all of the investigations, and through my experience in telecommunications, it was pretty clear to me that the market was failing because we had the residual monopolist, Telstra, operating in the market and time and time again refusing to make investments in it.

Even the former government put the wood on Telstra to see what kind of investment they could pressure. And what did they come up with? A half-baked OPEL proposition that did not even stand up at the first test, which was how many people this network would reach. It fell over at that point. There was nothing under the former government that would satisfy the future-proof attributes of the National Broadband Network.