Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

$40 billion to deliver something that cannot guarantee the speed down or a speed up. What a bunch of geniuses! And just for good measure they are the only company, and this is the only country in the world, that are trying to buy a copper network. Do you know what most companies around the world are doing with their copper network? They are selling it because it is worth more for the scrap value than the technology value. There are companies out there buying telcos' copper networks to rip them out off the ground and sell them on the spot market. But no, not in this country. In this country we are going to buy the network and we are going to keep using it. Unbelievable. What a disgraceful waste of taxpayer dollars.

What we saw in the last election campaign was those opposite saying that this was about trust. All promises and guarantees before the election, but after the election no guarantee from anybody who actually understands the technology—no guarantee. And, most importantly, the MTM delivers inferior upload speeds that will disadvantage the millions of small businesses in Australia. That is right: they are going to spend $40 billion to disadvantage small businesses, particularly in regional and rural Australia. But despite all of this, the strategic review somehow assumes that the MTM will generate a similar revenue to an all-fibre rollout. They cannot deliver the top-end products and they cannot deliver the upload speeds that small businesses need, but they can make the same money! Absolute geniuses!

What is of particular concern to those of us on this side of the chamber is that the coalition's plans—and this is another pernicious attack on ordinary Australians—state that they want to see Labor's fibre-to-the-home broadband rolled out in 'high-value suburbs'. So if you are rich enough to be able to spend a bit of money on broadband you get the best network. But if you are in the not-so-high-value suburbs you get the second-rate Mr Malcolm Turnbull network. The second-rate network; that is what Mr Turnbull is condemning the Australian public to.

Effectively, it means that people with more money will access the best broadband network in the world and people with less money will have to make do with an inferior broadband network. This is a betrayal in the 21st century of the most vital piece of infrastructure we need into the future. But Mr Turnbull has put forward his multi-technology mess as some kind of antidote to what he describes, in that other place, as 'Conrovianism'. Labor's fibre-to-the-home NBN—Conrovianism. It is a disease he talked about in the other place.

Well, the big and exciting news for Mr Turnbull is that the world's best broadband technology is being adopted around the world: in New Zealand, in Singapore, in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Spain, in France and in Indonesia—yes, in Indonesia as well. Mr Turnbull claims he knows more about this than the guys at Google. Well, I know who I am putting my money on. Google is building fibre-to-the-home networks in Kansas City, Provo and Austin, and is planning to expand to other cities across the United States. But, unfortunately, Conrovianism seems to be approaching pandemic levels around the world, because all those countries are building fibre networks. Not one of them is buying a copper network off an incumbent telco—not one of them.

I want to be very clear about this: Labor decided to have fibre to the home because the advice of the experts told us that fibre to the node was not a cost-effective path. The strategic review actually reveals that a committed and active management can deliver—this is in Mr Turnbull's own document—a fibre-to-the-home network on the basis of the last considered corporate plan, 2013-16. The strategic review has not made the case for a two-stage build as proposed by the coalition.

The committee's interim report recommends that NBN Co management be unshackled to continue rolling out fibre to the premises free from Mr Turnbull's political interference. I recommend the report to the senators, and I am sure I will be revisiting this issue.