Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the two bills before the Senate, the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer) Bill 2019 and the Telecommunications (Regional Broadband Scheme) Charge Bill 2019. I can indicate that the Australian Greens will support the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer) Bill 2019 but that we do not support the Telecommunications (Regional Broadband Scheme) Charge Bill 2019.

In general terms, the Australian Greens are absolutely committed to tech equity and also have a commitment to ensuring that all Australians have equal access to broadband, particularly those in regional and rural areas. We support the competition and consumer bill because we welcome the introduction of the statutory infrastructure provider obligations that will ensure minimum speed requirements of 25 megabits per second for Broadband users, irrespective of where they live. Of course, we also strongly support the funding of and rollout of the NBN to regional and rural Australia, but not as proposed by schedule 4 of the bill and the regional broadband scheme bill.

There's been a bit of politics played in the speeches that we've heard in here this evening. It's absolutely fair to say that, although there were some issues with the Labor rollout of the NBN, in terms of its vision and in terms of its capacity with significant redundancy to provide for the needs of Australians in relation to broadband well into the future, it was genuinely a nation-building project and one that the Labor Party should be congratulated for initiating—even though, as I indicated, there were some issues with the rollout, and things were going slower than many of us had hoped. In my home state of Tasmania, we've ended up—thanks to the foresight of former premier David Bartlett in bidding Tasmania in to be an early mover and an early adopter of the NBN rollout under a federal Labor government—in a better place than much of the rest of the country.

I also want to say that the current pandemic and the associated restrictions that have been put in place in Australia do show how broadband, and broadband at a reasonable speed, should be regarded as a critical and genuine public utility. I think many of us in this place have been working from home—of course, a large number of Australians have been working from home—and to do that without broadband that is reliable and has a reasonable speed is difficult. As we have moved towards a physical distancing regime in this country, it's actually broadband that has allowed many Australians to keep socially close to people even though they can't be physically close to them.

As I said, we do not support the regional broadband scheme bill because it's too narrowly targeted, it's too technology specific and it's not robust to changing telecommunications technologies. The scheme proposed in the regional broadband scheme charge bill unfairly targets people building new homes in outer suburban, greenfield housing areas, many of whom will be young families. It is technology specific, which may drive customers to alternative technologies, thereby further reducing the taxable pool of broadband consumers, and will, unfortunately for many, turn what should be a free or low-cost information superhighway into an information toll road.

Australia has the most expensive broadband of all OECD countries, and we should be seeking to improve affordability not reduce it—especially now, with more people unemployed, with more people seeking alternative work or study options and more people working from home as a result of the restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.