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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

Yet again we have seen the sheer incompetence and arrogance of this government in action in the chamber today. On serious issues to do with public safety, they say: ‘Just write a letter to Telstra. I’ve turned it away from my office.’ On major issues of administration, this minister does not even know what is going on in her own portfolio. In her answers she said, ‘Telstra are working with us on the metropolitan broadband black spots.’ Yet, if you go to the minister’s own website, under registered Metro Broadband Connect service providers, there is one company only, Allegro, producing wireless on the Gold Coast. Go to the minister’s website to look for registered Metro Broadband Connect infrastructure providers. Guess how many companies are registered infrastructure providers under the program the minister is claiming is saving Australia from broadband black spots? Zero registered providers. Yet the minister stands up in this chamber, misleads the Australian public and misleads this chamber by saying Telstra are registered. Not according to her own website.

The minister appeared, famously, in a Kempish—the word made famous by that senator and good friend Senator Rod Kemp—style performance on The 7.30 Report. When Kerry O’Brien asked a couple of straightforward questions the minister came out with one of the doozies of all lines. She said Australians in metropolitan areas ‘should be reasonably happy with their speed of broadband’. My emails have gone into meltdown. The ABC have a poll going and their emails are going into meltdown. Channel 7 have asked: ‘Are you happy with your broadband speeds?’ They are going into meltdown with the size of the response, with, overwhelmingly, 70 to 80 per cent of Australians saying, ‘We are not happy with the speed of our broadband in Melbourne inner suburbs, in metropolitan and outer suburbs and in regional and rural Australia.’

So what does the minister do? She issues a quiet little press release yesterday afternoon to try and cover up for the fact that she is so out of touch and so arrogant. She just slipped it out and did not circulate it to many people. It is entitled ‘Conroy misses the point on broadband in Australia’. It says:

Senator Conroy has completely misrepresented comments I made yesterday in relation to broadband services in Australia.

I was not even on the 7.30 Report. I have just read to you from the transcript: ‘Australians should be happy’. The minister goes on to say:

My comments were in relation to broadband speeds available in inner metropolitan areas of many of Australia’s capital cities.

That is right—if you can get a latte you can get fast broadband in this country, and if you can’t that’s just tough.

Senator Coonan needs to get a grip on the technological issues in her portfolio, the administration of her portfolio and, heaven forbid, she gets some vision in her portfolio to deliver Australia into the 21st century of infrastructure in broadband. It is not just the Labor Party saying, ‘Get on board Labor’s plan to take Australia into the 21st century.’ The Herald-Sun editorial says:

The Telstra mess is a national disgrace ... Yesterday, with some justification, the Government was accused of simply tinkering around the edges to satisfy its rural electorate rather than showing leadership.

That’s right—this government’s telco policy has always been ‘pork-barrel the National Party and don’t worry about the rest’. The Herald-Sun goes on to say:

This is not good enough. The Government must demonstrate leadership and decide if it can achieve its aims by working with the existing Telstra management. Too much is at stake to allow this unproductive farce to drag on.

Hear, hear to the Herald-Sun. It is not just the Herald-Sun; it is the Age as well. It says:

For all the complexities of costings and philosophical differences over policy, responsibility for this critical national infrastructure begins and ends with the Government.

The government found $3.1 billion for a trust to look after rural communication users, read pork-barrelling for National Party electorates courtesy of Senator Joyce, who proudly says that is exactly what it is for. The Age goes on to say:

It must not neglect the main game, which is the fibre network that a Government taskforce found would create benefits worth up to $30 billion. The big question now is what is the Government’s plan to ensure this vital investment in Australia’s prosperity is made?

The answer is nothing. (Time expired)

Judith Adams (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As far as Senator Conroy goes with his fibre to the node, he is fully aware that it was only ever going to be in the large metropolitan areas. It was not suitable to go out into regional and rural Australia. It is important that Senator Conroy realises that the government will be working in partnership with industry and other key stakeholders to use the $1.1 billion Connect Australia package to develop sustainable and strategic communications infrastructure throughout Australia. It may well be that the best way to address these issues is by using a substantial part of the Broadband Connect funding to stimulate the development of significant new broadband infrastructure. Importantly, any network that the government makes a significant investment in will have appropriate access arrangements to ensure that sustainable broadband competition is able to continue to develop in regional areas.

Labor used to preside over a cosy duopoly in telecommunications but, under the competitive regime that this government has fostered, consumers have been the winners. Prices have fallen by around 20 per cent and there are now around 100 telecommunications companies to choose from. With the expression of interest process for Connect Australia as a first step, the government has completed an expression of interest process to test the feasibility of an infrastructure based approach and to inform the design of any subsequent program. There were more than 70 expressions of interest received and the government is currently evaluating the results of this process. I can assure you that I have strongly supported one expression of interest from the area I come from in Western Australia.

The government is also confident that we will see some very exciting infrastructure projects grow out of this funding to leverage projects worth much more than the contribution being put forward by the taxpayer. There could be a mix of fibre, copper, satellite and wireless solutions to deliver quality, high-speed internet services to areas where the competitive market simply will not go. Importantly, these projects will be developed on top of the significant infrastructure based competition already occurring in competitive metropolitan and major regional markets. 

I will also comment on the payphone issue that was raised by those members opposite. Telstra’s plans to remove up to 5,000 payphones were first revealed earlier this year, and I made a speech about them. Telstra is already a quarter of the way through this rationalisation program, but it has become apparent that in most cases the removals are where there are already multiple payphones at one site. It is important to note that there are more than 60,000 payphones in Australia and, given the significant growth of mobile phone use, it is not surprising that the use of payphones has dropped. However, payphones continue to be an important community service for many people, and that is why the government regulates Telstra to ensure that payphones are reasonably accessible to everyone in Australia.

Telstra cannot just remove payphones where it feels like it. There are at least 7,500 unprofitable payphones and two of those are being removed from my community. As far as we are concerned they are not used, so why should they stay there and be maintained? Telstra cannot remove these other phones because of the universal service obligation. On top of this there are tens of thousands of profitable payphones which will remain in operation. Obviously there are surplus payphones in Australia that are not necessary for Telstra to meet its community service obligations, especially where there are multiple payphones at one site. But the government will not allow Telstra to leave communities completely stranded without payphones, and Telstra cannot do this under the law.

We are committed to maintaining the USO and it will not be watered down. In fact, in June this year the government actually increased Telstra’s obligations in relation to the removal of payphones, and it also increased the responsibilities of the regulator, ACMA, in monitoring Telstra’s obligations. Telstra is now required to undertake stricter consultation processes, identify all of its USO payphones in regional and rural areas, and rewrite its USO standard marketing plan for payphones. Considerable progress has already been made with these initiatives.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Science and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too would like to take note of answers to questions asked of Senator Coonan today. I believe that those people in voter land who watched question time and heard the responses of the minister to the questions put to her will be desperately disappointed and quite worried that the future of telecommunications infrastructure and the decisions about how things are to be pursued are in her hands. It seems that Australia is missing the boat. While countries all around the world are recognising that their national telecommunications infrastructure is vital to their national interests, both social and economic, the government here has completely lost the plot.

We saw Senator Coonan the other evening on The 7.30 Report making the ludicrous claim that no Australian is unhappy with broadband access in Australia. I looked at the Yahoo!7 website before I came to question time today and, at that stage, there were over 2,700 responses to a poll and 67 per cent of voters said that they were not happy with available broadband internet speeds, and I can understand why. My experience of living an hour down the road is of a ludicrous internet service, and I have spoken about it here on many occasions. The fact is that if you are just a little outside of a main centre you cannot access a broadband service at all.

Australia needs something that is much more reliable and much more appropriate to the 21st century. We need a fibre-to-the-node network if we are to ensure our future prosperity, but the Prime Minister and Senator Coonan mistakenly believe that copper is the answer for Australia. We are up the creek without a paddle at this stage, and we are being outdone all around the world. Our competitors like Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and the US have moved towards fibre optics, but what has happened in downtown Australia? Nothing. A significant section of the existing copper based infrastructure in Australia resides in areas where it will not be economically viable to upgrade to a fibre based information highway. There is only the government to take leadership on this issue, and that is what we are not seeing from the minister or from the Howard government. Once again, they are failing Australians everywhere, especially in regional Australia.

What are the messages that are coming from the market? First of all, Telstra today reported its worst annual result since the government sold out Australia and sold off Telstra nine years ago. Today we heard that Telstra’s annual net profit fell 26 per cent from $4.3 billion to $3.18 billion. It fell by $1 billion. Yesterday Telstra announced that it was pulling out of its $4 billion fibre network rollout. What is the result of all of this incompetence from the Howard government? Today we hear that members of the government themselves are calling for Telstra’s CEO, Sol Trujillo, to be sacked because he does not have the right attitude to the government, or, to put it another way, he will not do the government’s bidding. It is a very depressing state of affairs.

I asked Senator Coonan about the Telstra payphone at the Wollongong TAFE college. I understand that perhaps Senator Coonan has not actually been to the Wollongong TAFE campus. It is a very sprawling campus. It is very dark at night and there are very serious issues about people having access to payphones, and that same issue translates to universities, school campuses and other tourist places, which are the places that Telstra has targeted its removal of payphones. The real reason is, as Telstra itself says, that its payphone business now loses about $30 million a year—that is, about 55 per cent of the telco’s 30,000 payphones lose money. That is what it is about; it is about Telstra saving money, and the universal service obligation can be damned.

Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a complete embarrassment! This debate on taking note of answers was opened by Senator Conroy, a man who is reported in The Latham Diaries as having said, when offered the shadow ministry for telecommunications: ‘I don’t know anything about communications and I couldn’t care less.’ Isn’t that entirely typical of the way in which the Labor Party have approached this matter of communications? They have done it on the basis of putting someone in the shadow portfolio who knows nothing about it and cares less, and isn’t that apparent in the development of the Australian Labor Party’s policy towards communications?

For the 13 years that the Labor Party was in government, there was an abject failure to address the issues that Australians needed addressing in relation to telecommunications. We had a quiet and comfortable telecommunications duopoly between Telstra and Optus, about which the Labor government of the time failed to do anything at all. Labor did nothing to plan for the introduction of digital television and radio to Australia. It did nothing to fix failures in relation to services in country areas. It did nothing about the development of pay television. Australia was one of the last industrialised countries to acquire pay television. The Labor government prevented people in regional and rural areas from getting access to increased radio services in various ways. There was about as much development of telecommunications policy during 13 years of Labor as there was development in the science of astronomy during the early Middle Ages, and that is precisely where Labor remains at the moment.

Senator Stephens happily drew attention to the alleged failure of this government to do anything about the development of telecommunications services and alleged that we had actually ‘lost the plot’. Perhaps the other countries would not be as far advanced as she alleges they are if it were not for the fact that we lost so much time in the development of telecommunications in this country as a consequence of the Labor Party failing to deal with the issues that should have been dealt with in 13 years of government. We have been left with a situation where we have to play catch-up.

The government since 1996 has done a remarkable job in trying to redress the failures of that early period. It has tried to introduce a telecommunications regime for Australia that brings us to a position where we are getting closer than we have ever been to the standards that apply elsewhere in the world. The Labor Party fails continually and is yet to provide us with a credible policy that will see the continuation of that policy when and if it ever returns to government—one hopes that is never. By contrast, in the period we have been in government I think we have made remarkable progress in developing a significant telecommunications regime in this country. We now have nine or so competitors in the marketplace, all seeking to provide services to Australians. They have provided infrastructure—ADSL 2, for example—with speeds of up to 19 megabits per second. Four hundred data service lines have been installed, with a promise of 500 new data service lines in the future. High-speed cable networks are being developed.

My colleague Senator Adams made reference to criticism that the Telstra network would only serve the capital cities, raising the question of what would happen to the rest of Australia—that is, the provincial, rural and country areas—and suggesting that it was going to be left out in Telstra’s proposal. We have a regime now that promises in the not too distant future to address these failings and provide the services that Australians desperately need and are anxious to use for business and personal purposes. In addition to that we have a much more effective competition regime. We have a much more deregulatory regime; this is essential to telecommunications, where the technology is changing rapidly, where there is necessary oversight from a regulator and where there is a need to sometimes address the bottlenecks. (Time expired)

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Sport and Recreation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to respond to Senator Vanstone’s tirade, attacking workers, unions and me. I believe it is misguided. Senator Vanstone ought to be thanking Labor and the unions for pointing out how the 457 visa scheme was being rorted and how the Office of Workplace Services was allowing it to happen. But I suppose it is politically difficult for Senator Vanstone to attack the Office of Workplace Services and the extreme Work Choices legislation, so the next best thing was to come in here and personally attack me. The fact is that the department of workplace relations and the Office of Workplace Services were responsible for sitting on the complaints brought to them by these workers. They did absolutely nothing; there was no sign of any activity from the minister. In fact there was dead silence. Rather than gracefully conceding that intervention through parliament actually got the thing moving, Senator Vanstone has managed to score the biggest political own goal that I have ever seen her score by saying that it was not just skilled migrants who were being ripped off but 164 other restaurant workers as well. This proves the whole point to me: if the issues were not raised in parliament and the Office of Workplace Services was not embarrassed into conducting these investigations then nothing would have happened. I believe there would never have been an investigation, and I do not believe that the investigation would have been broadened to cover other restaurants as well. I thank Senator Vanstone for making this point so clearly on our behalf.

I suggest that Senator Vanstone is trying to distract us from her embarrassment and the Howard government’s embarrassment that exploitation of hospitality workers is far more widespread in restaurants—as she conceded today—than has been previously estimated. I think her disgusting personal attack on me was completely unwarranted, and I ask her to apologise. She should come down to the chamber now and do so. This government’s poor management of the 457 skilled migrant visa scheme and the incompetence of the Office of Workplace Services has been completely exposed through this. While the minister is not responsible for DEWR and the Office of Workplace Services—and I can understand her frustration with them—she is responsible for ensuring that standards for workers here under the 457 visa are maintained.

I note the government has acted in the bill before this place, where greater sanctions are applied to employers if the conditions of a visa are knowingly and recklessly breached. This is a response to the problems that were being experienced. Previously, employers doing the wrong thing under the 457 skilled migrant visa scheme could only be sanctioned by not being allowed to sponsor those migrant workers ever again. So that in itself, through the minister’s own legislation, is proof that the government knows it has a big problem here. It would not have known the extent of this problem if this issue had not been raised in parliament. So I am shocked at the sheer front of a minister who is clearly exposed and embarrassed by the extent of exploitation that I presume either the minister for industrial relations or OWS would have had to make public eventually. If they had not, we would have extracted the fact that there were 164 workers underpaid or 48 in breach of the award conditions in Senate estimates come November. Instead she has tried to shield herself and her government’s embarrassment by launching this pathetic, personal attack.

Workers do need to be brave. They do need to step forward and make complaints. They do need to join unions. But I find the hypocrisy disgusting. It is hypocritical for Senator Vanstone to suggest that unions ought to do more, when it is this government that has passed extreme industrial relations legislation designed specifically to remove the capacity of unions to go into these workplaces in the first place and to remove the awards—the minimum conditions—that these hospitality workers rely on and upon which the findings of these underpayments were based. Without these awards we would not be able to stamp out this exploitation, and that is the system of industrial relations that the Howard government stands for. It is extreme and it will deny the protections that we have been able to enforce by raising these issues in parliament and by embarrassing the government. (Time expired)

Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the answer Senator Lundy just spoke about—the answer Senator Vanstone gave to a question asked by Senator Fierravanti-Wells. She was addressing the issue of migrants in her answer and, towards the end of her answer, referring to the Labor Party, she said, ‘You let them in to sit on welfare queues.’ She is the minister for multiculturalism. I was astounded to hear the minister make that comment in question time today. The minister should be retracting that comment and apologising to the migrant community of Australia, who hold high positions, who have contributed so much to our community and who have made us the wealthy, diverse country that we are so that we can celebrate our multiculturalism. To have the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs making that comment was absolutely astounding to me.

Just this week I have had representations—as I know many other members of parliament have—from the Australians for Lebanon group. These Lebanese migrants who have come to Australia are doctors, lawyers and members of parliament, and they have contributed so much to our community. I was absolutely astounded to hear the minister who is responsible for multicultural affairs making these kinds of comments. I call on the minister to retract the comment she made in question time today and to apologise to the migrant community.

Question agreed to.