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

Under standing order 74(5)(b), I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

Based on the evidence we have received from the committee, the overwhelming majority of these questions, as the minister is aware, as she just outlined, to NBN Co were due on 21 December 2020. Today is 16 February 2021. This means that the questions outlined are now 58 days overdue and counting, which is simply unacceptable. And I understand that there are a number of other questions which other senators have placed on notice in the Senate to NBN Co which are also overdue—significantly overdue. This lack of responsiveness reflects very poorly on the minister for communications and very poorly on NBN Co. More broadly, it underscores a lack of respect for Senate accountability, which has plagued the communications portfolio throughout the parliamentary term of this government. Labor calls on the Morrison government and NBN Co to release these questions immediately and stop disrespecting the intelligence of Australian taxpayers.

The majority of the questions on notice go directly to the economics of the NBN and financial metrics underpinning the NBN Co Corporate Plan 2021. They go to the issues such as debt, cash flows, cost per premises, operating costs, capital expenditures, bonuses and a range of other information that allow the parliament, the media and the Australian public to better understand what was happening with our public money. In fact, much of this information was consistently published in previous corporate plans, but this year the government decided to withhold this information because they did not want the media or the parliament to have visibility of its latest cost blowouts. It's another smokescreen. It's another cover-up. So, today, the Senate seeks an answer to that question. What exactly is the Morrison government trying to hide by not answering these questions or allowing them to be answered?

What we know is that the release of NBN Co's corporate plan was delayed this year. It's normally released on 31 August, but this year it was delayed. It was withheld until 23 September. Notably, it was withheld until the afternoon after Minister Fletcher had announced the government's embarrassing copper backflip at the National Press Club. And then, when the corporate plan came out later that afternoon, it immediately became clear that key information published in previous corporate plans had been omitted. So laughable were the redactions that the revised cost of the NBN, $57 billion, was not mentioned anywhere in the document.

In terms of the information sought by the questions on notice, we know this information is held with the Chief Financial Officer and could have been provided to the Senate in December. We know that NBN Co's corporate affairs division is among the best resourced corporate affairs divisions in the country, if not the best resourced. We also know that the delay of these responses is not an accident—it's intentional. It's clear that the intent was to withhold this information.

NBN Co and the government have gone to great lengths to prevent the Chief Financial Officer of NBN Co from appearing before the Senate and other parliamentary committees. The one time the chief financial officer was forced to appear, under the threat of a Senate order, the Chief Executive Officer of NBN Co wouldn't allow him to open his mouth and respond to any question of substance. It was the most curious form of witness protection.

There is a very simple reason that the minister for communications is seeking to delay the release of this information: this government's inferior NBN has not been faster and it has not been cheaper. On every measure, this technological debacle is slower, is less reliable and is more expensive. Let it be lost on nobody that in 2013 the Liberals, standing alongside a hologram of Sonny Bill Williams at Fox Studios, promised their second-rate version of the NBN would be delivered for $29.5 billion. Then it blew out in 2014 to $41 billion. Then it blew out again to $49 billion in 2015. Then it increased to $51 billion in 2018. By late 2020, it had surged again to a forecast of $57 billion. What a shame that the technology hasn't surged as fast. Worse still, the government even tried to cover this figure up and have their public officials invent a new accounting methodology to talk about the costs of NBN.

It took less than 90 days from when the rollout was supposed to be completed for the government to begin desperately backflipping towards fibre, imposing greater cost and time on consumers and taxpayers. If you want the Oxford definition of 'incompetence' and 'waste', look no further than the Liberals and this hapless minister for communications and their technological omelette known as the NBN multitechnology mix. The Liberals promised every Australian would have access to minimum speeds of 25 megabits per second by 2016. We are now in 2021, five years on, and these minimum speeds are still not being delivered over the copper NBN network.

According to reports, up to 238,000 households still cannot access minimum speeds, which are actually a requirement of both Australian law and the NBN Statement of Expectations. The Liberal Party—yes, I'm referring to the same Liberal Party who are on track to amass $1 trillion in debt—has used taxpayer money to purchase over 49,000 kilometres of new copper for the NBN. That's enough copper to wrap around planet earth, with some left over. Labor has heard that the government maxed out the copper supply in Australia and had to start importing copper from Turkey and Brazil. If you're a global copper trader, the Morrison government is your best friend.

Who can forget when Malcolm Turnbull, the then Prime Minister, hailed HFC technology as 'the great game changer'. Now Minister Fletcher has said that too. It most certainly did change the game, but for all the wrong reasons. Never has the rollout of network technology in Australia been more of a shambles. The NBN HFC rollout is the most uneconomical and, arguably, the most unreliable in the world. There is a good reason former NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow wanted to toss the entire HFC footprint in the bin. There's good reason that Mike Quigley and his management team also rejected the use of HFC, under Labor. After talking it up as the best thing since sliced bread, the Liberals had to scrap the Optus HFC network, because it was not fit for purpose. That was a humiliation. Then they had to pause the rollout of the remaining HFC network in November 2017, because the technology was so unreliable. Turning on your vacuum cleaner was enough to cause your internet to drop out.

Just last fortnight we found out that NBN Co will pause activations on the HFC network because they have run out of the chips for their modems. What a hot mess! No wonder Launtel, a Tasmanian ISP provider, recently wrote a blog referring to HFC as 'a dog's breakfast' and singling it out as the most unreliable technology on the NBN network. Remember, this was the stuff that the previous Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull hailed as a game changer. A Tasmanian ISP said, 'It's the most unreliable technology on the NBN network.'

This brings me to the performance of the NBN during lightning storms. We have been hearing reports from the Blue Mountains, the Hawkesbury regions, parts of Greater Sydney and outer Melbourne that fibre-to-the-curb modems on the NBN have been literally getting fried during lightning storms, with some households requiring up to six modem replacements, with technicians having to visit each time; not very efficient. There's been an unacceptable lack of transparency on this issue but, from what we understand, lightning is causing a voltage surge down the copper line and into the modem.

The Liberals had one job and that was not to stuff up fibre-to-the-curb like they stuffed up everything else. This entailed ensuring that the electronics and vendor equipment used to deliver the service were fit for purpose and had adequate surge protections. If storms are capable of blowing up six consecutive NBN modems then something is not right. When political parties are incapable of taking a long-term view and consistently put politics ahead of the public interest, it invariably extracts a heavy price. Australians have paid more and gotten a worse NBN, and no matter how much spin the Liberals churn out, that is the stark reality. This 'build a dud and backflip it later'' approach means NBN Co is now borrowing billions more to construct a fibre network that will run in parallel with the existing copper network. Critically, despite new cost blowouts and rhetoric about upgrades, the government has only budgeted for one in 10 households in the copper footprint; 400,000 premises are to receive a fibre lead-in between now and 2024. On top of this, the full copper network will have to be operated and maintained, while the fibre network constructed in parallel goes underutilised. Remember the copper that wraps around the planet and there is some left over? A lot of that's going to be now underutilised.

You would in all sincerity be hard pressed to think up a more illogical and costly way to deploy a national broadband network with public money. After $51 billion, the purchase of 50,000 kilometres of new copper and a decade of ridiculing fibre, not only have this government forfeited their credibility but they have done so without explaining what the real cost of their capitulation is. This backflip is not simply a vindication of Labor policy but an affirmation of something more fundamental: the Liberals get the big calls wrong.

To sum all this up, we have a minister and a public company spending $57 billion of taxpayers' money, disrespecting the Senate and seeking to evade security and scrutiny. We have a copper network that is so defunct it still cannot deliver minimum speeds to up to 238,000 premises. We have an HCF network that is arguably one of the biggest and most expensive telecommunications debacles in the world. We have modems literally frying because of lightning surges down copper lead-in cables.

Evidently, the decision in 2013 to dump fibre has resulted in a colossal waste of time and money. Do it once, do it right, do it with fibre—had the Liberals simply followed this path, Australians would have a faster and more reliable network at far less cost to the taxpayer. Little wonder we have a dud NBN at a cost now forecast to reach $57 billion, nearly $30 billion over budget, and are ranked 61 globally for speeds and a rollout schedule running more than four years behind what the Liberals originally promised. They said they could do it better and cheaper, and they haven't delivered on any of that. It's no wonder this government is trying to evade scrutiny; it is really no wonder at all. I would call on the government to ensure they hold NBN to account, provide the answers to these questions, and provide an open and transparent process through Senate estimates and in other areas. They should be scrutinised. (Time expired)