Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee additional estimates report. There is a number of areas that the committee touches on in this. Within this committee we cover an extensive amount of ground at the hearings: cuts to the CSIRO, whaling in the Southern Ocean, Australian Heritage Strategy, the Green Army Program, environmental regulation, the Antarctic, water reform, the Great Barrier Reef, our national Biodiversity Conservation Strategy, renewable energy, the Bureau of Meteorology, the National Wind Farm Commission and many more areas.

The Communications and the Arts portfolio considers the work of important government funded agencies such as Australia Post, the ABC, SBS, the Australia Council, ACMA and Screen Australia, but a significant amount of the communications estimates is devoted to the NBN portfolio, and I guess that that, particularly, is the scrutiny of the rollout of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's substandard NBN. Some of the issues I want to touch on today are around questions on notice. Particularly when we go into estimates, we have dates when questions are to be given to agencies by and when we expect the responses by. We had questions from the previous estimates back in October that were returned on 5 February, when the next estimates was on 9 February. That is certainly not appropriate from our point of view.

When I questioned nbn co on that—and as the Hansard of 9 February shows—Mr Morrow from nbn co said that 'the list of questions was finalised and sent on 9 November.' So we had the estimates in October, then the questions were sent on 9 November. He recalled that the Hansard deadline was in fact 14 December, which was correct. But they had sent 80 per cent of their questions by 9 December—quite some time prior to the next estimates. I did ask the minister at the time, in estimates, why they were held up in his office, and the only response I got was that they would probably go to the department. Was the minister holding onto those questions and, if he was, why? Some of those questions were very, very important, particularly in relation to the area on the west coast of Tasmania and the NBN rollout that I have been concerned about for a long period of time. I think it was very important to make sure that we had those responses in adequate time to be able to advise our constituents and the community of the west coast as to what was happening with NBN in their part of the world and also to enable us to prepare ourselves for the next estimates. But we were not given the courtesy of that.

One of the questions I asked that was taken on notice was: what is the population of the largest town scheduled to be connected to satellite NBN nationally? The response we got from nbn co was that that was not known at this stage, which I thought was quite bizarre. They said that the access technology for specific towns would be included in future releases of the three-year construction plan, so they did not even answer the question. Interestingly, on Tuesday of this week I asked the question again at an NBN committee, and the response I got was that, yes, Queenstown—which has around 1,200 to 1,400 premises—is the largest town in Australia that will be connected via the slower satellite. They were slated to get the full fibre rollout under the previous government and also under this government. It was not until the middle of last year, 2015, that that was changed to be satellite.

Some of the timing of these questions is really important for that community not only to understand what is happening but also to understand why those changes have occurred, so they can try to understand why that happens. But they were not getting the answers from anyone at all. They were not getting answers from the government, they were not getting answers from—