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

I rise to make some remarks on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011, and it is not before time. This bill is very similar to the fibre deployment bill that was introduced in 2010, which lapsed when the last parliament was dissolved for the election. Many witnesses who gave evidence for the first turn of the wheel, the first iteration of the bill, pointed out some quite serious flaws, which the government addressed and then served up something quite different. The similarities are that the bill answers questions about what will happen as the gigantic retrofitting exercise of fibre infrastructure is about to get underway on a large scale to most of the premises in the country.

What will happen to what is being built while that rollout is occurring? What will happen to the estimated 1.9 million new premises that will be built while the NBN is being rolled out so as to ensure that we do not leave those people behind? The whole point of the first iteration of the bill and this one is to ensure that new developments have access to fibre technology as they are being built. That, of course, reduces the cost of retrofitting, which is estimated to be roughly $1,300 a lot or unit where no passive infrastructure has been supplied. I did not detect anything in Senator Birmingham's comments that undermined the general premise of the bill. Let us not leave people behind. And let us not send technicians and people back down streets that have only just been built in order to dig trenches to put in the infrastructure when that could have been done at the time.

The key distinctions and differences between this bill and its predecessor are that this bill sets out the key requirements and does not leave tasks to subordinate legislation, and so we have a much better idea of where the government is heading and we will not need to wait for the regulations. That is largely, I think, because of the timing. Some significant issues that were not resolved in 2010 have since been resolved and clarified. Obviously, senators will be very well aware that this year has seen a number of major milestones, including at least, and most obviously, a better definition of the heads of agreement. While that has not been put to Telstra's shareholders, I think there is a general sense now that we know where this whole process is heading, and that of course is crucial to NBN Co.'s understanding of how it will access existing infrastructure.

Teething problems that were experienced when NBN Co. was very new and when the government and Telstra were in negotiations have now been greatly clarified. The bill, therefore, sets out that NBN Co. is the infrastructure provider of last resort in new developments. A developer can choose another entity if they so wish, or NBN Co. is the infrastructure provider of last resort. I think this sets to rest most of the objections that the development community raised in their submissions to the inquiry into the first version of the bill where it was left up in the air and there were concerns expressed that developers would have to pick up the cost or, indeed, householders would have to pick up the cost. It is very important that that has been set to rest. Developers and property owners will now be responsible for doing the trenching and ducting, and Telstra services will infill developments of fewer than 100 premises, until the NBN fibre rollout takes place and reaches those areas. Developers can use any fibre provider of choice on the proviso that they meet NBN specifications and open access requirements.

I have some sympathy with some of the points that Senator Birmingham raised earlier. The bill does provide for what would look like a very fluid market and competition at this wholesale level in the greenfields area, but in fact I think it is quite unlikely that we will have a particularly liquid market. I think it is going to settle fairly rapidly into a handful of providers, chiefly NBN Co. and Telstra and a couple of the other incumbents, such as TransACT, who obviously still have a very important role to play. But I do not think we are going to be seeing vibrant competition in this layer. Unlike Senator Birmingham, who appears to be promoting competition for the sake of it, I do not think that is necessarily going to be as problematic as the coalition are making it sound. The bill tries to ensure that developers have fibre-ready passive infrastructure, which is just a clever word for the holes and ducts and so on for the cables to be installed, for the future provision of fibre for use by any fibre provider. NBN Co. will not be charging developers for the installation. I think it is a much more elegant solution than the first bill, which, as I have said, left a lot of things up in the air.

As we flagged during the committee process, we are not inclined to support the opposition's amendments to this bill but perhaps not for the same reasons that we have not supported a number of coalition propositions to NBN related legislation. Mr Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, was sent on a mission by Tony Abbott to just smash this thing up, just destroy the network and make it into as much of a political liability as possible for the Gillard govern­ment. That is a very important reason why the coalition are not sitting on the government benches at this time. That extraordinarily destructive attitude towards a really important piece of infrastructure for this country, including, you would have thought, for the constituency of the National Party, made it much easier for the regional Independents to cast their votes when the time came. But I think the coalition's position has shifted. I do not think the amendments that Senator Birmingham is proposing here are in the order of the kind of sabotage that has been attempted over the last 12 months or so. At every opportunity, the coalition have sought to derail the rollout of NBN Co., and I think these amendments are something of a different order. They are an inelegant and unworkable solution to what is probably a genuine problem, and I will speak more on that.

In the dissenting report, the coalition agree that it is highly desirable to encourage the rollout of fibre in new developments—so far so good—but then they go on to propose a number of measures that complicate rather than simplify the process. I will speak in more detail on them when we come to the committee stage of the bill. It was interesting that the language in Senator Birmingham's speech gave away the reason why we will beg to differ when we come to vote on the coalition's amendments. He said that, even if the government provided a cheaper and easier solution for developments, nonetheless competition would be more important. At that point I thought there was something really deeply jarring there in that we would be seeking to promote the principles of competition even if there was a more elegant solution in just having NBN Co. and then, by extension, Telstra providing most of these services, which would make it cheaper and easier. What exactly would the benefits of competition bring to an equation in which it is cheaper and easier for developers and, of course, for the people who are moving into these new estates? Why would we be promoting competition if it made it more difficult and more expensive, which is obviously the logical conclusion?

There are some things for which setting up the free flow of markets is very good—and at the retail level for the NBN project, that is exactly what is going to happen. Telstra might think that they are the incumbent, but I actually think that, in the RSP market and in the provision of services to people at the retail level, we are going to see vibrant competition. But just as we do not want people rolling out a parallel network of roads or powerlines to promote competition, I think that the hardware layer needs to stay in public hands and that the competitive aspects of that layer will be at the margins. They will be in wireless provision and, to some degree I think, in greenfield provision. But it is not the main game and perhaps it should not be.

The NBN Co. has been designed as a natural monopoly. We do not want other providers running parallel ducts down people's roads and ripping up people's gardens just to ensure that the principles of competition are met. I think the government has the hardware layer and the wholesale layer quite right. This goes back to the debates which we have been having over the last 24 months or so on the disaggregation of Telstra and the structural separation of the wholesale and retail arms. All this bill is really doing is bringing that process to a logical conclusion, with some carve-outs for incumbents like TransACT who have already made themselves a legitimate space in the market and have actually been doing quite well, as have a number of other providers.

The NBN is a very large project and with projects of this size transitional arrangements are going to be necessary. As much as we would have liked the NBN to be in place today, it is not possible to simultaneously extend it to all Australians nor is it possible to extend the NBN to all small developments across the country. There is quite a delicate balance to be struck here between not wanting copper to be installed in greenfield developments, which is then going to be ripped out in 12 months time when NBN Co. comes past, and not forcing NBN Co. or other fibre providers to, effectively, run exhaustively long extension cords out to places which are nowhere near the first and second release sites of NBN Co. We recognise the difficulty which is inherent in the transitional arrangements—that urban expansion is occurring at the same time as we are undergoing this enormous retrofitting operation. Some balancing needs to be done.

The NBN will provide 93 per cent fibre coverage to Australian premises—to homes, to schools, to businesses and so on. The fact that the coalition are still out there trying to bring this project down is just a source of unceasing amazement. I would have thought it would have been fairly clear that the outcome of the last election, for the first time in my experience, hinged on communica­tions issues. I think that is a really healthy thing in this age in which the communica­tions sector and everything that it underpins makes up such an important part of our economy and brings us closer to the rest of the world as our region lights up and as the rest of the world lights up.

I think this is exactly what the Australian government should be doing and it rolls back some of the cloudy and very confused rhetoric surrounding the provision of what are, effectively, utility services—that the market will take care of it. Some things the market takes care of very well and some things it does not. If the market had been able to take care of it, we would not need the NBN—because it would have already happened. The Nationals supported the full privatisation of Telstra. That was meant to bring perfect competition along so that the free market would take care of everything. Instead, of course, the obvious happened—the profitable areas of our cities and towns were very well served and, in some cases, overbuilt with competitive infrastructure. But the regions were stranded. We predicted that that would occur and that was exactly what did occur.

If you are going to provide infrastructure of this kind to regional areas, it is going to be more expensive. Then you have a choice. Do we want to make it more expensive for customers in regional areas to access this infrastructure—in which case, just let the market rip and fibre will go out to where the market can afford it—or do we want to do what we have done with electricity, with water, with transport infrastructure and with gas, where it has been reticulated, which is make sure that everybody in Australia gets to pay the same no matter where they live? There will be some disadvantages to living in regional areas that no amount of infrastructure will be able to eliminate. Not every town is going to have a big teaching hospital and not every town is going to get the hardware for the fibre for the NBN. But the very least we can do, I think, is make sure that it costs the same to access these services no matter where you live. If you are going to do that, the cities are going to need to subsidise the bush. It was uncontroversial when we did that with water, electricity and transport. I do not see that it should be controversial that we are doing it with communications, particularly given the importance of this sector.

The other thing which I think the opposition continually forgets is that this is not a public investment which will pay for itself in time. NBN Co. is not a government department. It is a corporation which will run for profit. But it will run for profit with the imprimatur of shareholders who hold seats in this parliament. As senators are no doubt aware, and as Mr Quigley of NBN Co. is no doubt becoming quite weary of, we can call senior levels of NBN management into estimates committees or the joint committee which was set up to watchdog this project. We can keep the company on a tight leash in a way that we could not with Telstra once we had flogged it off—and I do not believe that any amount of regulation could have prevented the kind of gaming of markets which we saw with Telstra. I think that is the great advantage of the Commonwealth build­ing this infrastructure and, in a very conscious and premeditated way, subsidising regional areas to get this world-class infra­structure. How the National Party have found their way to opposing something like that, I am absolutely at a loss to explain. Perhaps Senator Joyce can explain that for us. We have here a model which, for the first time, will actually bring world-class broadband—it will leapfrog us ahead of a number of other countries—not only to the inner cities, not only to central Melbourne and not only to Fremantle but to the remote Aboriginal communities in the north-west of WA, to regional communities in Tasmania and to places that cannot even get dial-up at the moment. I think that is a profoundly important project.

There are a number of reasons why many people in here are hoping that Tony Abbott is not successful in his project of just smashing the government and getting an early election. One is that, I think, the NBN would be a casualty. I hope that the phone lines in National Party offices and in the offices of regional MPs are ringing and that people are saying, 'What on earth are you doing trying to pull this project apart?' Arguably, its opposition to this project cost the coalition the Treasury benches and I plan to make absolutely certain that people are very aware that this project hangs in the balance. I do not think it is yet at the stage that, if there were a change of government, the NBN Co. would survive. Mr Turnbull has already drawn up plans for the potential privatisation of a highly fragmented network that simply has not reached anything near its fullest extent and to somehow hand over buckets of money to private providers to fill the gap. It did not work in the 13 years that the coalition were in government last time and I cannot imagine why we think it might work now.

This is not an antimarket position either. The free market and competitive markets will have a very healthy role to play at the retail level. But I think it is time now to just get on with the job of the volume rollout. The joint committee will be an able watchdog and so will the other institutions and levers that this parliament can bring to bear. Let us get on with it. I look forward to debating some of the coalition's proposals which, unlike some previous amendments that we have seen, have been advanced in good faith. I look forward to the long overdue passage of this bill.