Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, you are not going to catch me on that, because, while you have tried to proclaim me as an expert on things, I made the point very clearly before that I do not propose or pretend that we are experts on everything. I can, if you want. I can quote some of the evidence received by the Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network about the costs of developing these things, of installing the fibre and so on, if you want. We can go through the submission of Greenfield Fibre Operators of Australia, which stated that:

NBN Co Agreements with Developers, who have already applied for 133,000 new lot connections in Greenfield developments since 1 January 2011, evidences that the cost of each connection is currently averaging over $3000 per lot (excluding any back haul construction costs).

Current prices for GFOA networks that equal or exceed the current functional performance of NBN Co networks are up to $1500 per lot (excluding any back haul construction costs). FTA TV and Pay TV may add $300 per lot.

That was from the submission made by GFOA to the committee's inquiry into this legislation. If you want to talk about costs, TransACT said, according to the committee's dissenting report, that:

… the approximate cost depending on choice of provider and specification used, of installation of a fibre network per premise is up to $3500. TransACT stated:

The ballpark type numbers indicate that pit and pipe is somewhere in the order of $500 to $1,000 a premise and a turnkey solution is anywhere up to $3,500 a premise depending on who deploys it and what the specification is.

They are fairly valid points, but none of them get away from the reality of what you have just said and made quite clear to the chamber in this debate—that is, that the first of two models that will be available to developers is that they can use a private provider to have fibre laid. Of course, that private provider, as a private business provider, is going to have to recoup its costs somehow. The only place it can recoup them under your model is to charge the developer, which costs the developer more. Or, the provider can let NBN Co. do it and recoup the costs 'on a national basis', to use your words, over a longer time horizon, charging the developer nothing.