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

The other issue about OPEL is that the technology choices did not stack up. I think it was relatively easy to unpick.

Senator Macdonald, I am glad you are here, because you know as well as I do that the objective of the former government was at least to try to provide universal access. Yet we do not hear from this opposition the same sentiment. We hear platitudes and all we get is obfuscation and delay. All we get is a new excuse after the old. Right now we are hearing the call for the business case. I remind you all that, when this bill was introduced last year, there was another document being called for as a condition for the passage of this bill. So it does not matter what is being considered, or the imperative nature of it, the coalition will grasp on to whatever they can and use it as an excuse to delay.

My own feeling about the case for the National Broadband Network and this request for information about the business case is that we have effectively traversed these issues for well over a decade. We have had inquiry after inquiry—and not least the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network established when the coalition had the majority of senators in this place, which delivered no less than four formal reports to the Senate. They had their forum. Opposition senators had every opportunity through the course of the broadband select committee to call on all of the information, including, as they did, the implementation study, and they were able to ask questions of the publishers of the implementation study. At every step of the way, opposition senators had the chance to ask the questions, to call witnesses—pretty much whoever they liked. But still it is not good enough. When it comes to the crunch and after all of those inquiries—the inquiry into this bill, all the legislative and references committee inquiries, the select committee inquiries and the combined references and legislative committee inquiries; there have been so many—it is still not enough for the opposition.

We go full circle here. It comes back to the fact that they are just not interested in engaging on the substance of these bills and what it means to telecommunications industry structure and what it means to competition policy in generating a telecommunications sector that I think will be one of the most elegant regulatory structures in the world. Why? Because it has a wholesale-only open-access network that is completely independently regulated and, on top of that, a thriving competitive regime for retail service providers. The vertical cross-subsidisation that caused distortion in the market and allowed consumers of telecommunications services to endure far higher prices than they ever ought to has finally been resolved because of the National Broadband Network policy. Of that I am immensely proud.

I come back to the objective of the NBN. The Labor Party’s objective has always been to provide universal high-bandwidth broadband access to all Australians. Because we understand the depth and substance of telecommunications policy, we have gone to a model that identifies the necessary structural separation of operators in the market and acknowledges that you have to have an independent regulator governing the pricing on that wholesale-only open-access network. That is the model. I think the opposition have trouble stomaching it for the reasons Barnaby Joyce laid out very clearly for us in the chamber the other day. For the opposition, it does not matter how good the policy is. The opposition, we know, are opposing this very supportable amendment. The government are supporting the Greens amendment to insert in the objects:

(c)  the availability of accessible and affordable carriage services that enhance the welfare of Australians.

It is a worthy objective, but the opposition cannot find it in themselves to even support that. Why? Because it is just about opposition for opposition’s sake. I know the opposition will be judged harshly by all Australians who are waiting on those waiting lists to even get an ADSL service, who are on the end of the long tails out of town with a pair gain system that was designed in about 1963 and only get a line out of their area if not too many people on that pair gain system are on the phone at the same time. I know there are Australians who resent being pushed by Telstra on to an expensive mobile data service when they could have a National Broadband Network. (Time expired)