Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Minister. I will take up the offer of a briefing. I appreciate that very much because I do not have your obvious expertise in this area and I would very much like to know exactly how that is rolling out.

It is interesting, too, when you look at the delivery under the NBN that is going to happen out in those regions. Is there a structural separation now? I would suspect there is not out in those remote areas. Perhaps, Minister, if you would be so kind, we could include that in the briefing. Maybe I could ask of officials at a briefing exactly how that works, because it looks very much to me like a structural separation has not happened out in the more remote areas. As I said, I have not been very involved in this lately and I could be completely wrong, but wouldn't it be an absolute shame if, through all of this reinvention and this wonderful NBN, remote areas ended up exactly where they were to start with? I do not know if that is the case, so I do appreciate the minister's offer of a briefing, but it occurs to me that that would be a very bad place to end up if, indeed, that is the case. It may well not be.

The reason we have this amendment is to try to create some sensibility in this whole process. I appreciate the answers the minister gave Senator Birmingham before. The area I am interested in is the NBN as a provider of last resort. When we are looking at this construction, as I understand it, where it is not going to be taken up by private companies the NBN is the provider of last resort. That actually looks a little bit similar to the old AWB provider of last resort before we deregulated the wheat industry, which was an extremely good measure that we no longer have, much to my sadness and that of my Nationals colleagues and many, many wheat growers out there across the country. My question is on the issue of the NBN as the provider of last resort. I am genuinely interested in: what triggers that, and what is the time frame from the trigger to when the NBN provides that?