Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to speak on this National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010 (No. 2), which has been brought here by Senator Birmingham as a private senator's bill. The bill requires the NBN Co. to prepare a business case for the NBN and the Productivity Commission to prepare a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN. This is just yet another example of the opposition's absolute opposition to the NBN in any shape or form and its determination to create as much mischief about the NBN as can possibly be created. It is largely the same bill that Mr Turnbull introduced last year into the House. It was voted down on 19 November.

Now that the bill has been amended in recognition that the government released the NBN corporate plan in December last year, the only thing that this bill now does is require the Productivity Commission to do a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN by 1 December this year. The time frame was ridiculously short when the bill was intro­duced last year, and again it shows that this is not a serious bill that the opposition wants to debate, because a proper cost-benefit analysis could never be done in 3½ months as this bill requires. It is important, too, to note that the Productivity Commission does actually have a forward work program and budget, and there is no provision there to support this initiative at this time.

Having said that, on the merits of us doing a cost-benefit analysis, we know that on the cost side of the ledger the NBN is an investment; it is not a cost. The corporate plan shows a return on investment of a little over seven per cent and we know from the Greenhill Caliburn report that the assumptions underlying the revenue and cost projections in the NBN corporate plan are reasonable. On the benefits side there is also plenty of evidence already. The OECD, the UN and Access Economics all say that investment in high-speed fibre platforms will generate billions of dollars in economy-wide benefits. Two Access Economics reports that have been released by the government show that the benefit to telehealth on its own in Australia could be between $2 billion and $4 billion a year and that Australia could save between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion a year if 10 per cent of the workforce tele-worked half the time. The OECD says: 'Effective use of high speed broadband can provide significant improvements in productivity and efficiency across a number of sectors, such as energy, health, education and transport.'

As someone who is a member of the Joint Committee on the NBN, I can say that in our recent visit to Broken Hill we examined the backbone work that has been going on there and the extent to which the whole community of Broken Hill and the region of western New South Wales have embraced the concept of the NBN and its potential. It really reminds us of the extent to which people are waiting with bated breath to engage with the NBN. Wherever we went on those field visits, people were asking us, 'When is the NBN coming to us?' We identify the potential, particularly around the issues of e-learning, e-health and e-commerce, and we know that the NBN is going to provide those opportunities for many parts of regional Australia.

The United Nations says in its report:

Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology. It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness.

An IBM study in 2009 found that even a fibre-to-the-node network, an inferior net­work to that which we are building here in Australia, would conservatively boost the NPV of GDP by between $8 billion and $23 billion a year over a 10-year period, and jobs by 33,000 by 2011 in an economy operating at less than full employment. We can see that there is extraordinary potential for the NBN.

This is not a bill that we should be supporting; it is just a half-hearted attempt to throw up roadblocks to the NBN rollout. As I said, it is another piece of mischief by the opposition, who are fundamentally opposed to the NBN and what it represents. The NBN, as we all know and appreciate, is critical infrastructure. It will connect our rural and regional centres to our main cities and the wider world with world-class broadband. It is interesting to note how accepting people here in Australia are about the speed of their broadband connections when, if you travel overseas, particularly in Asia, they have leapfrogged us and have access to high-speed broadband and internet connections which are the envy of us, if we could only imagine that it was so. Here in Australia we are really behind the eight ball in this.

The NBN will deliver affordable high-speed broadband services to all Australian homes, to businesses, to schools and to hospitals, no matter where they are located in Australia. Equity of access is the funda­mental principle. As Australia's first national wholesale-only communication network, the NBN will also support genuine competition in the telecommunications sector for the first time, which has to mean better outcomes for consumers. Right now what we have is a vertically integrated, privately owned monopolist—Telstra. The NBN will connect 93 per cent of premises in Australia with optical fibre, delivering speeds of up to one gigabyte per second, which is many, many times faster than people experience today. In fact, the potential of the NBN is yet to be imagined in some parts of economy. All remaining premises will receive next-generation wireless and satellite technology, providing speeds of 12 megabits per second.

We know absolutely that the NBN will dramatically improve Australia's communi­cation environment, and Australians are already lining up for those services. There is an overwhelming level of support in communities. The percentage of households that signed up for a fibre connection in the mainland first release sites averaged about 75 per cent—88 per cent in the first release site near Armadale, 90 per cent in Willunga, 78 per cent in Kiama Downs, 62 per cent in Townsville and 52 per cent in Brunswick. People are really hungry for this technology and are anticipating its potential and the way in which it is going to improve their lives and opportunities. The NBN services were officially launched on mainland Australia in Armidale, a good country town focused on its university community, on 18 May; in Kiama Downs and Minnamurra just a few weeks ago, on 29 July; and in Brunswick on 4 August, only a few days after the NBN committee had been there and inspected the extraordinary infra­structure that has been put in place. It really is mind blowing, and people need to go and see what this infrastructure looks like—how smooth and how unintrusive it is but also what its potential is. It will transform the way people think about internet access and the World Wide Web.

NBN Co. has also commenced construct­ion in nine of the 19 second release sites that were previously announced, which is going to cover 50,000 premises across Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT. I heard yesterday the concerns and the arguments that were raised by Senator Humphries, for example, about the expectations of the people of Gungahlin and other people in the ACT. The point that Senator Humphries was making yesterday, saying, 'Oh, well, we've got TransACT here and that's a good provider,' really does not go to the issue of how competition will improve access to services and reduce the costs over a period of time.

This piece of legislation—as I said, a mischievous piece of legislation, really, to bring us here today—has been seriously considered in terms of its effectiveness. The viability of the NBN has been very clearly examined by the 2010 McKinsey-KPMG implementation study that was released in May last year and again by the Greenhill Caliburn review of the corporate plan, which was released on 14 February 2011. Based on the conservative assumptions of the NBN Co. corporate plan, the NBN will support uniform national wholesale prices that will support affordable retail prices, and the plan shows that the Commonwealth's investment will be repaid with a return that exceeds the 10-year bank rate. Greenhill Caliburn found that the key assumptions underlining the revenue and cost projections in the NBN corporate plan were reasonable and sound and, being a viable business in its own right, the NBN will also have broad economic, social, educational and healthcare benefits, as I have said. The rollout of the NBN will be subject to ongoing scrutiny from a joint parliamentary committee, of which I am a member, and the Freedom of Information Act. This bill is a clumsy case that is about making mischief and slowing down and putting roadblocks up to the NBN rollout.

The definitive agreements between Telstra and the NBN Co. announced in June will also improve the construction process and are providing NBN Co. with immediate access to Telstra infrastructure, such as the pits and pipes in the second release sites. We saw really good examples of that when we inspected those facilities in Brunswick last month. Building on the fibre rollout, on 3 August the NBN Co. also announced the first communities to receive NBN Co.'s high-speed fixed wireless service. The first to receive the service will be homes, businesses and institutions in the less densely populated rural and remote communities that surround Geraldton in Western Australia, Toowoomba in Queensland, Tamworth in New South Wales, Ballarat in Victoria and Darwin in the Northern Territory. I know, from speaking to my colleagues in the Northern Territory, that they are really keen to see that rollout there. It is very important for the Northern Territory, particularly, to have access to improved technology services. Customers will be able to access services over the network which use the latest 4G wireless technology from the middle of next year.

We are now seeing communications often being led by Regional Development Austra­lia or by councils actually preparing their communities to be national broadband ready. The challenges around doing that are about understanding the potential and the capacity of national broadband and the way in which it can be used to improve everything from e-health and e-commerce through to productiv­ity. In Broken Hill we saw the way in which the NBN was going to be used to facilitate the establishment of a film studio—an amazing facility that will enable Broken Hill to capture the opportunities presented. More than 60 films have been made in Broken Hill over the years and it is commonly used to make advertisements. It is very bad luck, as we heard only a little while ago, that the next Mad Max movie is not going to be made there because it is too green. There are many opportunities for that film studio to bring a whole arts precinct to Broken Hill, and without the NBN that could not possibly happen.

On 1 July NBN Co. launched its interim satellite service, bringing forward the availability of enhanced broadband services for regional Australia. I heard yesterday the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy explaining how the whole of Victoria was covered by that service, particularly around Ballarat and Bendigo. As someone who has to use satell­ite services, I can tell you the frustrations of not having a decent broadband connection. It is very frustrating and it is very expensive. The current service is not very reliable on cloudy or rainy days, and it is critical that we make sure we improve our satellite services in this way. The interim satellite service will be available to individuals and small busi­nesses that cannot access metro comparable broadband services ahead of the NBN Co.'s long-term satellite services in 2015. I am hoping that by then maybe Goulburn's services might extend a little beyond the town boundary and I will not have to use satellite services anymore.

This bill is a frustrating bill. Yet again the opposition is trying to prevent Australians having a world-class, affordable broadband service. In the Joint Committee on the National Broadband Network we talked long and hard about the issues of transparency and scrutiny of the rollout. That is the role of the joint committee, and we have been diligently thinking through how we will be doing our six-monthly reporting to the parliament on those issues. The government welcomes transparency and scrutiny, but continued analysis and scrutiny of one of the most scrutinised projects ever funded by the government is without merit. What the opposition has proposed today is a furphy. It will certainly add further costs to the rollout and it will continue to deny high-speed services for all Australians.

The second part of the bill, which requires the Productivity Commission to prepare a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN, is really calculated to delay the NBN. It follows a pattern we have seen the opposition follow several times in the past. We saw it when we introduced our competition and consumer safeguards legislation in 2009—the opposition did not want to debate the issue until we produced an ACCC report on the original NBN tender process, and we did that. Then they would not debate the bill until the implementation study was released, and we did that too. Then, when the competition and consumer safeguards bill was last debated, they filibustered—they put 19 speakers on the list for debate, so we could not take it to a vote. We have already had a Senate select committee into the NBN, which was extended five times and produced five reports. NBN Co. CEO Mike Quigley willingly comes to Senate estimates three times a year. The government has estab­lished, as I say, the House of Representatives committee to examine the benefits of the NBN, and the Joint Committee on the NBN that the government agreed to establish has been holding public hearings. As I said, we most recently had public hearings in Melbourne and Broken Hill. The joint committee has a balanced composition of members from the government, the oppo­sition and the crossbenches, and very broad terms of reference. Of course one of the members of the committee is the shadow minister, Mr Turnbull. Mr Turnbull is getting all of the information that he needs, and he is seeking to do more through the committee process—which is a much more appropriate way of teasing out these issues than seeking to have the Productivity Commission prepare a cost-benefit analysis in a ridiculously short period of time.

It is pretty hard for me to see how the opposition can continue with its dishonest attempt to portray the government as being anything other than open and transparent about the NBN. As I say, now the opposition wants to legislate for a Productivity Com­mission cost-benefit analysis. But, the shadow minister has admitted that even if a cost-benefit analysis for the NBN came back unequivocally positive, he would refuse to guarantee the opposition's support. So what is it that we are really about here? We could look at whether there are cost-benefit analy­ses on some of the opposition's plans—whether it be the shadow minister's water plan or the OPEL regional broadband plan. We have never seen cost-benefit analyses on those things.

This NBN process has been the most scrutinised and investigated process that I can ever remember. We do not need to go yet again to the Productivity Commission to burden them in a time when there are no resources and no time available in the forward work program for the Productivity Commission. The opposition have said that regardless of what the Productivity Commis­sion says, anyway, they are not necessarily going to accept the findings. I suggest that this is another mischievous opposition attempt to delay the NBN.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I see that the government is determined to push ahead with the National Broadband Network. The government is determined to ensure that the decision announced a couple of years ago to develop a very expensive, very elaborate and very anticompetitive broadband regime for this country should proceed, notwithstanding that this model was put together in essence in a very short space of time. We need to remember that the government went to the 2007 election promising to deliver a broad­band network that would cost Australians, in terms of public investment at least, some­thing like $5 billion. It became evident after a time that this scheme was not going to work and that it was incapable of attracting the investment from suppliers and providers necessary to make it work. Accordingly, that plan was dumped in favour of a much, much more ambitious plan: a $50 billion plan. That plan was put together in a matter of days between the tender process for the original version collapsing and the new one being announced.

In circumstances such as these the relevance of the government's own promise to the Australian people before the 2007 election that it would not proceed with major government developments or infrastructure projects without a cost-benefit analysis became far more relevant—and this is the granddaddy of all government developments or infrastructure projects. It is the most ambitious thing that Australia, collectively, has engaged in and it lacks that very essential prerequisite of a cost-benefit analysis, which Labor itself made such a virtue of advocating for before the 2007 election. That is why this legislation is before the Senate today.

The opposition does not, in any sense, question the need for Australians to have a fast, reliable broadband network that can be accessed by Australians at an affordable price; we do not demur from that goal. But we question whether the government has done the basic homework necessary to assure the Senate, the parliament and the Australian people—the taxpayers—that there has been the right choice in this network, the National Broadband Network, over other alternatives. That is why this legislation calls for the cost-benefit analysis which the government failed to do.

We are implementing your policies with this legislation. We are holding you to the commitment you made to the Australian people back in 2007 because we believe in fiscal rectitude and the prudent use of the taxpayers' dollars. We do not think that there is any way that the very much afterthought type exercises that this government has engaged in around its implementation of the NBN can be justified as a proper, full and complete cost-benefit analysis of this major project. That cannot be allowed to stand if the commitment of the Australian people is to stand in the order of $50 billion.

Of course, during the last few years of the previous Howard government moves were underway to deliver high-speed broadband to Australians through the OPEL policy. I have heard criticism that the Howard government came to this position late, but I remind honourable senators that technology changed so quickly in the period before that decision was made, and continues to change so quickly, that it is right to hold back until the best available technology emerges in the marketplace. That is exactly what the Howard government did. It planned to deliver high-speed broadband with OPEL, not in competition with but in cooperation with the private sector. I believe that that plan would today have delivered reliable high-speed broadband to thousands of Australians—in fact millions of Austra­lians—who are still waiting for the NBN.

Senator Conroy, the minister, likes to cast the debate in terms of the government being on the side of modernity and the coalition being atavistic, that they are grasping the future and we are clinging to the past. But with those broad statements and emotional lines he ignores the truth that this investment is of such a magnitude and involved in an area of technology subject to such rapid change that it is unwise in the extreme to proceed without every possible check and review and every possible testing of the market that the government might have at its disposal and that, in short, by doing so the Australian taxpayer is fully protected.

There are a number of nagging doubts that any observer of the communications market would have to have in looking at the way in which the NBN is constructed. For one thing, it is the most expensive possible way to achieve the objective of fast, reliable broad­band. It uses the most expensive possible network design: fibre to the home. It makes no use of existing fixed-line last-mile communications infrastructure. In fact, it overbuilds all of that. In that sense, it is colossally wasteful. It is as if you decided that your kitchen needed to be renovated, your bathroom was in need of a bit of an uplift and that the back porch needed to have the floorboards replaced so you decided to knock the whole house down and rebuild it. That is the extent and the breadth of the decision that the government has made.

Again, it might be the right decision—but we just do not know, because a full cost-benefit analysis of this option versus the alternatives has not been done. We know that the NBN is the most anti-competitive way to achieve the objective of building universal access to fast broadband. Senator Stephens said that competition would exist in the marketplace. In a very real sense it is not going to exist in the marketplace. The NBN will be a new government owned monopoly, and all potential direct fixed-line competitors to it will be prevented from competing by a legislative or contractual constraint. That is even true for Telstra's HFC pay TV cables, which pass almost a third of all Australian households, and which could provide NBN-level broadband service almost immediately if the owners were provided with the appro­priate incentives and regulatory environment. That is not what is happening. There is no competitive involvement at that level: it is NBN or nothing. It is in a very real sense the riskiest available option to the Australian taxpayer. We know that the contracts NBN Co. is planning to sign to get the NBN constructed are extremely risky. By shifting to a cost-plus model NBN Co. has shifted a large and unquantified amount of economic risk onto taxpayers. It is taxpayers who are in the main liable for any cost blow-outs—so much for the government's ridiculous prev­ious claims that 14 major Australian con­struc­tion companies which failed to meet its price target were colluding in an attempt to gouge taxpayers. Not so.

And we know that NBN Co. is no longer just a carefully regulated wholesaler provi­ding a last mile level playing field where other carriers compete, as the govern­ment initially promised it would be. Instead, we find it muscling into new activities and displacing private sector rivals in areas as diverse as broadband infrastructure at new housing estates, communications needed by defence agencies and many services that existing carriers sell to large corporations. Mission creep is what is happening here, and it is a very easy thing to occur when you can access as much money as you want at the government bond rate. Again, this concept is changing. It is changing all the time in scope, in cost, in structure and in leadership as we look at the reshuffle that is going on at the moment. All of these changes demand some rectitude in the overview provided by the government and other regulatory bodies about the way in which it proceeds.

To justify the vast expansion of the public sector and the overturning of decades of bipartisan agreement on the merits of private ownership of business operations, unfettered competition and competitive neutrality between public and private entities, the government points to the economic and social benefits of broadband—on that there is no dispute. Senator Stephens spent a lot of her speech talking about the wonderful things that broadband will do—film studios in Broken Hill, schools being able to do things they could not do before and e-health strategies and so on. All of that is agreed. But I could come forward to Senator Stephens and describe the wonderful benefits of a Maserati motor vehicle—what great things it can do that an ordinary Holden Commodore cannot do, how much faster it can travel, how brilliant the wheels are and what other fantastic things it does. The question that Senator Stephens has not asked herself is: how much is it going to cost, is it actually what we need, and can we get from A to B more affordably? This is a very real point to make, because we know that the biggest impediment to universal internet access in Australia is cost.

It is very largely in lower socioeconomic groups that internet access is least penetra­ting, and the more elaborate, the more gold plated, the more expensive the model the government chooses, the more those very sorts of people are going to find it harder to access this new National Broadband Net­work. So to talk about the wonderful things it does is, I think, not the point. The question that Australians need to have answered is: how much is it going to cost us? I have no doubt that any particular community you point to and say, 'We can roll out this NBN to you; when do you want it?' will say: 'Yes. Do it now. We want it yesterday.' But, at the end of the day, the question is not what they want now; the question is what they get and how much they are prepared to pay for it. Those are the questions that this legislation would be able to help answer, but with opposition from the government they may not get answered.

Senator Stephens referred to the NBN as being not a cost but a benefit. Indeed, in one sense it is, but you cannot divorce the cost from the benefit, and we need to know what those benefits are and how much they will cost us. She made the point about the NBN being unobtrusive. I refer to my remarks yesterday in the chamber, where I said that unobtrusive depends very much on the manner of rollout. The NBN regime will have the capacity to provide rollout in essence in any way that it wants. Although yesterday we dealt with legislation that provides for the infrastructure to be rolled out in greenfield estates in a way which is, in Senator Stephens's words, 'unobtrusive', the same guarantee cannot be provided with respect to rollout in existing residential areas of our cities and towns, because NBN is essentially able to override local planning regimes, and the capacity to do great damage to the aesthetics of local communities remains there. I particularly refer to my remarks about what was happening in the ACT, where we have a longstanding custom of no overhead wires between the street lights or the power poles running up our streets—but that may change. It could change under the NBN. Today I repeat my call for the minister to assure us that that will not occur. I would be very happy to receive that assurance and be told that I am scaremongering, but until I hear it I am going to continue to make this point.

The fact is that the Labor government has rushed forward to do what it needs to do for political purposes, and the proper assessment and evaluation of alternatives simply has not taken place. I note that in 2007, when Mike Quigley was still at Alcatel-Lucent and had to face shareholders who were not legally required to hand over money at taxpayers' expense, the company put out a white paper titled Deploying fibre-to-the-most-economic point. Not surprisingly, he concluded it does not always make economic sense to lay fibre all the way to homes in existing networks.

In fact, the paper concluded:

… the economics of FTTN are hard to resist, given cost points that can be 50 percent or less than those of PON—

or passive optical networks. In fact, this very architecture is currently being rolled out across many parts of the world. In the UK, for example, we see British Telecom planning to connect over six million house­holds to next-generation fast broadband using fibre to the node and only two million households using fibre to the home. I have to say that it is extraordinary that the Labor government not only has refused to contemplate this architecture for any of its NBN but is in the process of signing a deal with Telstra that will actually make such a design far more costly than it needs to be should a future government of either side wish to pursue a more affordable and less disruptive architecture. This is not the way in which a government should lay the found­ation for a flexible network capable of adapting to changes in market demand or technology. That is very much not a feature of the NBN.

I note that the leadership of the NBN is changing in a way which, to be perfectly frank, does not inspire a great deal of confi­dence. Major changes were announced just yesterday, and some of this was supposed to have been scheduled and planned, but it does not look like that. I have to say that I agree with the opposition's communications spokesman, the member for Wentworth, who described the NBN project as 'chaotic'. He said that NBN Co. had already lost two senior employees in the construction division after an earlier tender process was aband­oned and still had to sign construction contracts for many second release sites. He said:

This is an organisation which, at last count, had more employees than customers so the workload can hardly be to blame for the shake-up … It is an organisation employing 47 executives on salaries of more than $300,000 a year, so the NBN Co can hardly claim that it is working in an environment of restrained resources.

Those concerns, while not definitive of the problems at NBN, ought to leave Australians in a position of wanting answers—answers which, of course, they cannot receive because this government has not commiss­ioned the Productivity Commission to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis. That is the point of the National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010: it is to give Australians that assurance that the homework has been done before the money is spent. If anything the changes of recent days—the changes to the scope of the project, the changes in leadership and the changes in the anticipated cost of the project—lend themselves more and more to a full, appropriate, arms-length assessment of what is going on. For that reason I think it is imperative for the Senate to consider its responsibilities to the Australian people and ensure that this project gets that analysis.

I suspect that in only a few years time it will be possible for those of us who sit around this chamber at that stage to point fingers—presumably all from one side of the chamber to the other—saying, 'Everything you said about this didn't come true.' I hope it is going to be my side of the chamber that is pointing to the other side and making that accusation, but, whatever the outcome, I can say with some confidence that at least if a cost-benefit analysis had been done we would not have had to operate in that field of doubt. We would not have had to proceed on the basis of a wing and a prayer: 'Let's hope this works. We like the product; let's see if we can afford it at the end of the day. We think it might be great, but we just don't know.' All those questions are unanswered and, at the cost of $50 billion to the Australian people, I do not feel comfortable not being able to answer those questions.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to be able to speak on this bill this morning. The Australian Greens will not be supporting it, for the same reason that we have not suppor­ted various iterations of identical proposals over the last year or two. I am glad Senator Birmingham has joined us; good morning, Senator Birmingham. I am wondering whether when you rise to speak you could tell us how many times in both chambers of this parliament you have served up a proposition to subject NBN Co. to a cost-benefit analysis, because I have actually lost track.

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

Could you take that one on notice. I admire the perseverance, and I will just speak briefly about why we will not be supporting this bill.

Firstly, we have nothing against the Productivity Commission or the instrument of a cost-benefit analysis where it is applied in an appropriate context. You would be aware that the Productivity Commission pop up pretty regularly in the carbon price agree­ment, performing various studies and checks and balances. We were quite pleased, in our agreement with the government to make it more difficult for a future government to sell NBN Co. back into the private market, that the Productivity Commission will be the ones doing the analysis of whether or not it is in the public interest to sell NBN Co. in a decade or so's time. So we have nothing against the PC.

The problem, of course, is with applying a cost-benefit analysis to a project such as this—and this has been well canvassed on many occasions. Seeing as how the coalition have bolded up again, I am happy to describe again why we think it is the wrong instrument. There are the costs. How do you assess the costs of the NBN? How do we look at the cost side of the balance sheet? NBN Co. has published its business case; that has been peer-reviewed, and now it is the job of the Joint Committee on the National Broadband Network—which is chaired by Mr Rob Oakeshott, of which I am a member and which was an initiative of Senator Xenophon, who has just joined us—to watchdog the process and the project on a month-by-month basis to keep track of costs. The problem is that it is cost positive. It is a business; it provides revenue to the govern­ment. So how do we assess what the cost of the project is when in fact it is going to be generating revenue for the government and will in time pay its costs back? What does Senator Birmingham propose that we put on the cost side of the ledger?

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

The glass is still half full, Senator Birmingham, just as it was last night. On the benefit side, how on earth do you calculate the benefits? What you need to do is monetise an entire range of quite intangible propositions about the benefits of NBN Co. and then add them up—monetise them and add them up for all future benefits for all time, for a network of fast fibre that does not yet exist. I have no idea how the coalition would propose to do that.

But let us say that it were done. You would then need to provide a sensitivity analysis to show how the variables you threw into the cost side and the benefit side influence the results that fell out of your spreadsheet. Of course, a sensitivity analysis, if it is done with any degree of honesty and rigour at all, will show you that you can make the benefit side of the equation say pretty much whatever you like, depending on your degree of hostility to the project. What benefits will fall out depend on what variables you plug in. If we had done a cost-benefit analysis of the electricity grid we would not have built it because we would not have been able to monetise the benefits but we would have been able to estimate the future costs and say, 'That's going to be expensive; what are the benefits of that going to be?' How should we total up the benefits of having electricity, running water, roads, railways? We would not have built these things. Fortunately, we have a bit of an idea of what a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN would look like because somebody actually did one. Professor Henry Ergas and his colleagues attempted one in 2009 and they presented it to what was then a select committee on the NBN. They acknowledged that it was pretty rough, that it was a bit back-of-the-envelope, but at least they had a go.

What did that cost-benefit analysis find? It found that it was inefficient to proceed with the NBN if costs exceed $17 billion. Of those intangible variables that you plug into the spreadsheet, they decided $17 billion was the figure; that there would be no utility in building the NBN if it cost more than $17 billion to produce. They estimated, actually, that the costs outweighed the benefits by something in the order of $14 billion to $20 billion in net present value terms, which means you have got to pay very careful attention to the kinds of discount rates that they apply and all the bizarre mathematical formulas that they have to come up with to decide what the benefits of this network that does not yet exist will be. That is why we think it is an inappropriate mechanism. We know why the coalition have been so persistent: they want a rerun of that. They want to be able to stand up and wave around a stack of figures and say, 'Because it costs more than $17 billion, we'll be better off going and spending the money on more roads or more coal fired power stations'—or whatever it is that the coalition would prefer to see the public money spent on. I think on both the cost and benefit sides of the equation we would be wasting the Product­ivity Commission's time, even though it would potentially provide quite a useful political tool to the coalition.

There is a second strand of argument that says, 'Don't build it because there might be some future technology coming down the road that will make the NBN obsolete.' I think that is just basic ignorance of the laws of physics. And I wonder how long the coalition would propose that we hang around in that posture. They hung around in that posture—'Don't build anything just in case something better comes along'—for 12 or 13 years. It beggars belief that that has become the alternative policy position: 'Don't put in this network because something better might come along.' Something better than elect­ricity might come along as well, that is true. Something better than road transport might come along. Something better than retic­ulated water might come along. But we built that infrastructure, and at some point you have to say: 'It's time to build the infrastruct­ure for the 21st century.'

Mr Turnbull, by way of alternative, is providing a fibre-to-the-node model that was rejected by the government's expert panel two or three years ago. He is proposing a diabolically awkward, hybrid model that I think will lead us straight back into the swamp of policy paralysis that we spent most of the term of the Howard government in. The coalition when they held the Treasury and government benches told us, against the will of just under half of the numbers in the chamber in this parliament, that all we had to do was privatise the national carrier and the markets would take care of everything. How well did that work out? You sold a vertically integrated, state owned monopoly into the market and then walked away and watched as it squashed its competitors and leveraged its monopoly power into new markets. That is why it was so important that this parliament took the step that it did late last year to disaggregate Telstra, to separate out the wholesale arm so that NBN Co. could get on with the build out and actually repair some of the damage that was caused when Telstra was flogged.

I do occasionally feel a little bit sorry for Senator Birmingham and, indeed, for the member for Wentworth because they are MPs who are technologically literate. They use the technology, they know how it works, they know of the benefits—unlike Mr Abbott and some of the trolls that get wheeled out to just run the party line to destroy the NBN. I think the people who represent through Senator Birmingham and the member for Wentworth must sometimes lie awake at night wondering how on earth it is that they have been tasked with wrecking this project. It still beggars belief that the National Party get wheeled in here every now and again to try and ruin a proposal to bring rapid world-class broadband to regional areas. I have no idea how their party room accommodated that point of view, but somehow they have managed to, and they come in here to try and smash this thing up. To be completely honest, I have had enough with the trolling of the project, because that is what it has become. Some of the arguments have become pretty marginal. I think the member for Wentworth is doing a reasonably good job, under direction of a technologically illit­erate Leader of the Opposition, to at least try and condition some of the arguments to a degree, to provide the watchdogging that this project badly needs, but some of the arguments are so way off beam that they should simply be dismissed.

We tend to be a little bit inward looking in Australia and I think that is actually going to be one of the benefits of the project, that it will hook us up with the rest of the planet as it comes online. But let us just for a moment take a look at what some voices are saying about the project from outside the fishbowl of Australian politics. Dr Vint Cerf, who, along with a team of scientists, is said to have invented the internet in the 1970s and so is one of the real pioneers of the tech­nology, was awarded the US national medal of technology and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Here is what he said about the NBN:

I am so envious that you have a government that is willing to make the long term infrastructure investment of this magnitude and of this type. I will be pushing very hard for similar activities in the US but quite frankly you guys are way ahead of us.

And, of course, as the United States teeters ever closer to bankruptcy I think Australia will be in a position to get further ahead. He says:

I consider this to be a stunning investment in infrastructure that in my view will have a very long term benefit. Infrastructure is all about enabling things and I see Australia is trying to enable innovation.

That is a reasonably positive report from Vint Cerf. Eric Schmidt, who senators might know is the CEO of Google, has said:

Australia is leading the world in understanding the importance of fibre. Your new Prime Minister as part of her campaign and now … as part of her prime ministership, has announced that roughly … 93 per cent of Australians … will have gigabit or equivalent service using fibre. And the other 7 per cent will be handled through wireless services of a nature of LTE. This is leadership. And again, from Australia, which I think is wonderful.

Of course, he is in the technology sector and he has probably got a direct interest, you would say, in world-class rapid broadband in Australia. But, still, I think if they thought the project was a dud they would be saying so.

Since opposition senators frequently wheel in motor vehicle metaphors I was interested in this one that I spotted from Jim McKerlie:

"The Opposition is saying the proposal is like building a Bentley when we can only afford a Commodore," McKerlie said. The trouble with aiming to just build a Commodore is you will probably end up with a Go-Cart.

"… I don't think we can afford to end up with that."

Mr Paul Budde, who has given evidence at many of the inquiries that have tracked this project since its inception, is the managing director of one of the world's largest telco research and consultancy firms. Here is what he said:

There are many countries who at this point in time cannot afford to make this investment, and this gives Australia the chance to leap ahead and give the people and the businesses of our country a head-start in the digital economy. Think about what that can do for job creation and productivity …

Alan Kohler said:

Not only will the NBN not be a white elephant it will almost certainly prove to be a great investment … it could represent, on its own, a huge national savings plan.

I do not know how you fit that into a cost-benefit analysis. He continued:

When it’s finished the asset will be worth several times the government’s investment of $27.5 billion.

That is one of the reasons why the Australian Greens believe that this project should not be privatised—to avoid repeating the mistakes of the full privatisation of Telstra. It should remain in public hands, where we can get the directors of the company in front of esti­mates committees to be cross-examined by people like me and Senator Birmingham and asked what they are doing with the taxpayers' money. I do not often quote the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but I am going to this morning. CEO Peter Anderson said:

The instinct in the business community is that there can be a real productivity kick and benefit …

That, to me, seems common sense.

The executive director of Australia's peak body representing the interests of small business, COSBOA, said the NBN:

… is an equal playing field. You don’t get that too often … We want it, we need it.

So I do not really understand to which constituency the coalition are speaking when they bowl up in here either with well-meaning-sounding amendments like propos­als for a cost-benefit analysis or with some of the more elaborate attempts at sabotaging and bringing the project down that we have seen over the last 18 months or so. I do not understand who the constituency is.

I think it is high time we simply got on with not just building the National Broad­band Network but also our role as senators in this parliament, which is to make sure it does not cost any more than it needs to. We can do that in this chamber. We can do it in estimates committees. We can do it in the Joint Committee on the NBN, which Mr Oakeshott chairs, which I think is the perfect forum for identifying problems and tracking the rollout of the project.

I look forward to the network coming to Western Australia. If I have any criticism of the NBN project—and it certainly has not been perfect, but, for any project with this degree of risk, this scale of investment and this scale of rollout, there certainly will be risks attached—it is that it is running probably a year behind schedule. That is partly the fault of this chamber and the coalition's blocking tactics. We had Senator Minchin, the Senator for Telstra, running an elaborate series of blocking tactics to prevent the chamber even debating the legislation. Coalition member for Brisbane, Teresa Gambaro, obviously takes a different view. She was complaining that the NBN should be rolled out in her electorate—and that is the extent of my complaint: when is it coming to Fremantle? When is it coming to Kalgoorlie? When is it coming to Albany? I would like to see this network rolled out. I would like to see this parliament doing its job as a watchdog on this proposal and making sure that it is a smooth build. I wonder if Senator Birmingham, when he rises to speak, can maybe tell us whether this is the last time that we will see an amendment such as this.

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must say I agree with the bulk of Senator Ludlam's position here this morning, but I do not agree with him in relation to the position that the member for Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull, is taking on the NBN. Malcolm Turnbull is there simply doing what his leader has told him to do, and that is to destroy the NBN. I find it quite interesting that the former leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, who is supposed to be the great business expert and the great tech­nological expert in the coalition, has allowed himself to be bullied by one of the biggest bullies in town—that is, the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott. I think it is about time—

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

Senator Birmingham, I think your position is even worse than Malcolm Turnbull's, because it is clear what Senator Ludlam said: you profess to understand what the technology will deliver, you profess to be a modern, forward-thinking Liberal—I think that is an oxymoron, by the way; I do not think there is such a thing—and you profess to understand these issues, yet you are part of the team—

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

Now, you do not have to get too snaky about it, Senator Birmingham. You are part of the team that has set out to try and destroy what is one of the best, most innovative and most econom­ically responsible projects ever undertaken in this country.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't make me laugh too hard!

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not hard to make you laugh, Senator Birmingham, but you should be laughing at yourself. Your lack of commitment to the future of this country is clearly on display. Here we have another member of the team just walking in, Senator Macdonald. We will hear all the arguments, all the ranting and raving, from Senator Macdonald, but he has obviously not spoken to Ms Gambaro, who wants the NBN in Queensland. He has actually said in some of the Senate hearings that he has had complaints from some of the regional sectors in Queensland that they are not going to have the NBN.

The NBN is something that the coalition could never have delivered, could never have thought of. Why? Because they are a policy-free zone. All they are are wreckers. All they are about is negativity. All they are about is a mad scramble for government. They just cannot get over the fact that the Australian public would not put them in, that they were not trusted enough to get a majority, at the last election. So they will do anything, they will say anything, they will prostitute the few values that they have to push forward and try and destroy the NBN.

And what are we doing? We as a govern­ment are setting about delivering significant improvements in broadband service, with a quality service to all Australians, something that the coalition did not have the capacity to do in 11½ years. I was not here at the time and I am not sure how many failed broad­band policies you had. I think it was something like 20 at the last count. And what did you do? You allowed Sol Trujillo and his team to stand over you. It showed how weak you were as a government when these imported chief executives came here and stood all over you, demanding that you lay off Telstra and allow them to do whatever they liked. And what did you lot do? You capitulated to Telstra. You did not have the intestinal fortitude to deal with them. You could not deal with them. They stood over the top of you. It is a bit like what is happen­ing to Senator Abetz at the moment, where he is being stood over in the Liberal Party by other Liberals who do not agree with him. There is no leadership from the Liberal Party in their internal politics and no leadership in their national politics. Steve Ciobo is stand­ing over the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate. It is a disgrace.

But what we are trying to achieve is a significant broadband service and an addressing of the lack of high-speed broad­band in Australia, particularly outside the metropolitan area. We hear so much rhetoric from the National Party about the bush, but they have delivered nothing to the bush over the years. The federal government has done more for regional development in our time in government than the coalition could ever have contemplated and did not do over 11½ years. And we are doing lots more. There was absolutely no capacity to deliver to the bush, and it has been left to a Labor govern­ment to deliver broadband into the bush.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

Senator Macdonald laughs. The only thing I have in common with Senator Macdonald, I have to say, is this morning's tie for the Cancer Council. That is about it.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

Senator Macdonald, you raise your heritage. I am not sure there are too many highly conservative Macdonalds in Scotland. If you were trying to be a politician in Scotland, my friend, you would never be a politician, because in Scotland we know what the conservatives do. If you say to people in Scotland—I am not sure you have ever been there—'I am a conservative politician,' they would look at you aghast. You are an absolute disgrace to the Macdonalds. The Macdonalds in Scot­land actually stand up for working class people. They stand up for people's rights—not like you standing up for big business. You are a disgrace to the Macdonalds. Don't you lecture me about heritage.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

I am not going to enter into a debate with Senator Macdonald on Scottish heritage, which he would know very little of. My position is quite clear: if you want to do something decent for this country, you deliver the NBN.

What did Tony Abbott say? He said that he wanted to destroy the NBN and that Malcolm Turnbull would be in there to do it. That is what we are seeing here. We are seeing the negativity of the coalition. They have no policies, no ideas and no capacity to ever deliver a decent idea other than nega­tivity in this chamber. I certainly will not be lectured by Senator Macdonald, who came into the chamber the other night and waxed lyrical about Alan Jones and his 8,000 demonstrators out in front of Parliament House. I think I have seen somewhere between 800 and 2,000. The best you got was 2,000. I reckon it was about 800. I do not go down to listen to Alan Jones, the other arch-bully, out there trying to bully journalists: 'You do what I tell you or you shut up.'

Alan Jones is not an example of the common decency of Australians. Alan Jones, the leader of the wreckers out there, calls himself a 'broadcaster', whatever that is, so that he can mislead people. There is no need to deal with the truth. Just say what you like. Just tell lies. Tell the public misinformation. That is the type of leadership that is out there, and Senator Macdonald came in here all excited. He had got his youth back! He was a little puppy dog. The tail was wagging. Out there were 8,000 people bringing the government down. It was a pathetic per­formance. But, for somebody who operates the way Senator Macdonald operates, that is nothing unusual.

First of all, what we need to learn from this is that Senator Macdonald cannot count. He is a bit like a mini version of the whole Liberal Party. They cannot count. They cannot get their books right. There was $10 billion at the last election. They could not get their budget right. Now they have $70 billion that they have to find, and part of that will be at the expense of projects that actually help this nation—projects like the NBN, projects that will deliver benefits right across the country. People need to understand that you have people like Senator Macdonald, who cannot count. You have a Leader of the Opposition like Tony Abbott, who in his first decision on economics put Senator Joyce in as the finance spokesperson and then had to sack him a few weeks later because not only was he incomprehensible, not only could he not develop policy, he was bringing any remnants of the so-called Liberal economic prowess down. I do not believe in the Liberal economic prowess anyway. I have said in this place many times that Peter Costello was the most overrated Treasurer this country has ever had. He was overrated and he under­delivered, and he had absolutely no backbone. He could not stand up to John Howard. Even when John Howard was tottering on the brink of getting out of parliament, Costello could not bring himself to actually stand up for his own position. What did Peter Costello leave us? He left us with one of the lowest productivity figures in the OECD. He left us with no research and development of any capacity. He did not have the guts to deliver on climate change. He was just pathetic and overrated.

I have to tell you that the opposition have lost the plot completely. I believe they were economically incompetent when they were in power; it was simply about money rolling in and money rolling back out. There was absolutely no planning for the future, just economic incompetence. Senator Macdonald said that I am killing him because he is laughing so much. Well, he can laugh on, because that is the absolute truth of the matter. It was an incompetent government for 11½ years which had no idea and could not deliver on the NBN. The only argument they could put up to try to improve productivity in this country was Work Choices. Senator Macdonald supported Work Choices, and Senator Birmingham—the brave, new, future look of the coalition—supported Work Choices. People need to understand that Senator Birmingham voted consistently for Work Choices.

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

That was your argument outside the parliament. Your argument was that you would go for it.

Senator Birmingham interjecting—

You would do anything. You support Work Choices now, don't you? We hear all the arguments from you about the need for labour flexibility, and what does that mean? Rip away workers' penalty rates and take away their annual leave loading. We know what it is all about. Give them no rights. Sack them whenever the boss wants to sack them. This is what the coalition is about. No wonder the coalition were described as mean, tricky and nasty by their own people.

What we want to do is get a national broadband network up. Why do we want to do it? We want to do it because people like the Group of Eight—that is, the coalition of leading Australian universities—said this:

High-speed broadband network provides the capacity for distant doctors or patients—or midwives for that matter—to have real-time interactions with specialist colleagues in an urban setting if they need it …

…   …   …

Broadband connectivity allows clinicians, wherever they are, to engage in things like grand rounds—when patients of interest are discussed in teaching hospitals, people who are not physically in that building can connect in real time and participate in the questions and answers.

…   …   …   

… it can take years to get thousands of people in a normal randomised controlled trial. We can do online automated randomised controlled trials with people in their houses in a few months.

This is the Group of Eight. This is the coalition of Australian universities who say, 'Here are the possibilities of the NBN.'

I will just mention a couple of other groups. The Coalition of Small Business Organisations of Australia are the people that the coalition say they stand up for. They say, 'We stand up for small business.' So when they are trying to destroy the NBN let me just remind you of what the Coalition of Small Business said to the Senate inquiry:

There are 2.4 million small businesses … They are diverse, but I think I can say with confidence that the greater bulk of them want … access to affordable and high-speed broadband … for competitive reasons as much as anything.

The other group of people who are really fascinating are women on farms, and COSBOA had this to say:

I have seen a few of them use the internet quite well to sell products … and I know one young man is manufacturing and selling golf clubs online and doing quite a good job of it.

Then we go to education, and the Association of Catholic School Principals of New South Wales said this:

E-learning is truly already a reality in our schools. We have moved from paper to e-books to personalised learning and now to e-publishing in a relatively short time. Scalability is necessary to allow us to continue to grow, as I said, and to provide 21st century skills—

I will be interested to hear Senator Macdonald's arguments on scalability; he probably does not know what it is. It goes on:

Our school cannot meet the needs of the 21st century learner with 20th century infrastructure. Hence, the broadband is so important to us. Students are, as we know, the very greatest asset we have. The children of Australia, we believe, deserve an education that enables them to be global citizens of the 21st century. The 21st century classroom is currently grinding to a 20th century halt without fast reliable access to the internet. We dream of the possibilities for our children and believe that national broadband really does have the potential to make some of these dreams a reality for students.

This is the Association of Catholic School Principals of New South Wales, who were effusive in their support of the National Broadband Network. And what wouldn't they be? Because it is correct. It is about bringing new technology to how we deal with health, how we deal with education and how we deal with doing business in this country. If the coalition were half reasonable about this they would actually be saying, 'Let's get on and build this,' instead of running these arguments about cost-benefit analyses that are just so much nonsense. We had Optus appear before the inquiry I was chairing. Mr Krishnapillai, one of the key executives of Optus, said this in response to Senator Fisher:

There are probably a few things in there. The first thing is: I am personally of the view that in a decade’s time we will be looking back and wondering what all the fuss was about; because the connection of broadband to every home and every business and the capacity that it will enable—in my view—will lead to a flourishing of business opportunities and applications that we cannot forecast today. I know it is a difficult equation to add into any cost-benefit analysis.

What Optus is saying is that you cannot do cost-benefit analyses on the potential of the National Broadband Network. There is so much untapped potential there. There are so many unknowns. Senator Ludlam outlined what the OECD is saying about it and what other businesses are saying about it. It is the way of the future, and the coalition is the party of the past.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a debate on the National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010 (No. 2). Given that it is a debate, I should debate some of the comments made by the two previous speakers. I say to both Senator Ludlam and Senator Cameron—and this distresses me a bit, because I am not usually into personal denigration—that if you want to get into the personal attacks then you will get it back double from me. You of course will not want to wait around to hear it, Senator Cameron. Typically of you and your union bullies who run the Labor Party, you throw the spears and then escape before anyone else can have a say.

I first turn to the 'contribution', as I will call it—although it was hardly a contri­bution—by Senator Ludlam. If you ever needed any evidence of who is running this country you only had to see the apologist line Senator Ludlam took in his speech. Everything the Labor Party did was good; everything the coalition did was bad. I am sorry, Senator Ludlam, but none of us on the committee and none of us in this chamber shares your very high level of intellect when it comes to telecommunications matters. I am sorry about that. Please forgive us for not having all your intelligence, as you were telling us in your speech, but some of us do try to struggle by.

Senator Ludlam told us, with his superior knowledge, how the Labor Party has been doing everything right. Clearly Senator Ludlam falls into the same category as Labor Party people who, when it comes to spending other people's money, are first-class masters. They and socialists around the world find it easy to tax ordinary hardworking Australians to collect their money and then waste it on the stupidity of the projects of socialists like Senator Ludlam and Senator Cameron.

Senator Ludlam, despite his great intellect, could not understand how you would work out the costs in calculating a cost-benefit analysis that this bill calls for. Senator Ludlam must wonder how the Productivity Commission has worked out costs on everything they do cost-benefit analyses on. He must wonder how Infrastruc­ture Australia can do cost-benefit analyses on all the things they do analyses on. I could tell Senator Ludlam what the cost is for this white elephant that Senator Conroy has established, the NBN. At the moment it is $55 billion plus, and increasing by the day. You do not have to be terribly clever, Senator Ludlam, to work that out. All you have to do is go back and have a look at what the Labor Party has promised in relation to the cost of building this white elephant and then add up what they have actually spent.

You will remember that they had that tendering process halfway done when they pulled it all, at a cost of around $20 million, although I forget the exact figure. Then they did not know where to go . That was a couple of years after they had been elected to implement some sort of NBN. A couple of years later they have this $25 million assessment by McKinsey of what they should do and how they should do it—and this is before they even turned a sod on what was happening. The money just keeps rolling out.

Add up the continuing costs and you will get some idea of the cost of this. And then Senator Ludlam says you cannot work out the benefit of something like the NBN. Well, gee: the Productivity Commission and Infra­structure Australia can work out the benefit of other bits of infrastructure, like rail, roads and school halls. For all those sorts of things you can work out the benefits, so why does Senator Ludlam, with all his great intellect, think the Productivity Commission could not actually work that out? These are very pro­fessional people who are skilled at doing cost-benefit analyses. I am quite sure they can do it.

Senator Ludlam says, 'Look, don't worry about cost-benefit; you've got this NBN com­mittee to oversight it.' Senator Birmingham is on that committee, as well as Mr Turnbull, Senator Fisher, myself, Senator Xenophon and a number of other people. They are all involved in that. Sure, we can oversight it from this chamber or from the committee rooms, but unless you can get in and get the figures and do the clinical and professional analyses that are needed, you will never be able to get the same sort of result as a proper cost-benefit analysis, which this bill calls for, would provide.

I remind both Senator Ludlam and Senator Cameron that had the coalition won the 2007 election there would have been a very high-speed national broadband network up and running now, providing benefits for Aust­ralia. And yet, under Senator Conroy's model—the Labor Party model, the Greens model—we are still flailing around trying to get this network rolled out.

Senator Ludlam went on to quote a handful of people who all said that Julia Gillard was great, that the NBN was fantastic and that Senator Conroy knew what he was doing. I do not think they actually said the last thing—I had better not exaggerate there. But when we give the details to all of those industry and Telecommunications Act experts both within Australia and from right around the world who profitably run multibillion dollar networks we are told by the Greens and the Labor Party, 'Oh, yes, but don't take any notice of them—they're just profit-seeking individuals.' So it is okay to use the quotes and references that Senator Ludlam wants but it is typical of the Labor Party and the Greens that if you do not agree with them and their ideas you should be completely ignored.

Senator Ludlam also said that the parliament and the Greens can work out that government infrastructure projects do not cost more than they should. Well, Senator Ludlam, how did you go with the pink batts proposal? The one where you supported the Labor government to put in $14 billion worth of pink batts and then paid another $4 billion or $5 billion to pull them all out again? Great oversight by the parliament you provided on that!

And what about the school halls? This parliament was oversighting that and we have example after example of waste and corruption in the spending of government money. Senator Ludlam's best effort, I think, was then to blame the coalition for the fact that Senator Conroy could not roll out his NBN. You can really see where the Greens are scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to prop up their mates in the Labor Party when they come up with that. Since the 2007 election this proposal has been one series of disasters and confusions after the other, all caused, I might say, by Senator Conroy and his mates in the Greens. Senator Ludlam's contribution—and as I said, I unadvisedly call it that—is, with respect, not worth the paper it is written on.

Senator Cameron spent all but the last three minutes of his speech talking about matters that had absolutely nothing to do with the NBN bill. I think that just demon­strated Senator Cameron's abject ignorance of the NBN and telecommunications. I might say that Senator Cameron—and because this is debate I will respond; I should not, but I will—started talking about bullies, or 'boolies' as he called them. He spoke about Mr Abbott being a 'boolie'. This was coming from someone like Senator Cameron, who was renowned for his bullying tactics as a union boss. I suggest he should go and ask former Senator George Campbell about his bullying tactics. You might recall that it was Senator Cameron who not only supported Ms Gillard when she stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back but probably invented that sort of approach when he stabbed former Senator George Campbell in the back all that time ago.

If Senator Cameron wants to talk about 'boolies' or bullies, perhaps he could give us a commentary on what his New South Wales Labor colleague Craig Thomson did when he was another union heavy. I do not enter into that debate except to repeat what I saw on Lateline last night from the current general secretary of the Health Services Union, who said that there is $100,000 missing. She indicated that she was very concerned that low-paid workers who pay their contribution to the unions in good faith to get the unions to support them in their wage claims and their industrial conditions should have that money being wasted on—well, we do not know what. We will await the outcome of police prosecution. Suffice it to say to Senator Cameron, when he is attacking the coalition, that he should be careful about the words he uses. I would suggest to Senator Cameron that he should use any other word when accusing the opposition in this week than 'prostitution'.

Senator Cameron interjecting—

Senator Cameron, you would do well to curtail your language. I am sorry the chair did not draw that to your attention.

Senator Cameron then went on to a bit of a discourse—a confused and dishonest discourse, as are most of his contributions—on some Scottish heritage. My recollection is that the Camerons were part of the Campbell clan, which joined with the English King William to slaughter the Macdonalds at Glencoe. The Macdonalds brought in the Campbells—

Senator Cameron interjecting—

I did not raise the issue of Scottish heritage. The Macdonalds brought in the Campbells, succoured them and gave them shelter and comfort for a couple of weeks, then in the middle of the night on the word from the English King William the Campbells up and slaughtered the Macdonalds at Glencoe. I would not be surprised if the Camerons were part of that as well.

Senator Cameron, talking about bullying, will well remember the night outside an estimates committee hearing when he was challenged on a ruling. There was some discussion and Senator Cameron tried his old bullying tactics. They did not work with the committee. He then said, 'We are going to shut down the estimates and have a private meeting.' We did and he then came outside and confronted me nose to nose—I suggest wanting me to hit him, but I have been around too long to fall for that old trick. But he could not help himself—the old foot on the toe, the stand on the toe trick which I am sure Senator Cameron was pretty good at when he was doing his bullyboy tactics in the union movement. It does not quite work in this chamber, Senator Cameron, so keep your feet to yourself next time. He then spent a lot of his speech denigrating one of Australia's most respected, able and highly regarded broadcasters and commentators, Mr Alan Jones.

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

Senator Bilyk, put yourself against Mr Jones for honesty, integrity, ability, capability and interest in Australia and I will back Alan Jones any time of the week. Put yourself against Alan Jones on what he has contri­buted to the nation, as opposed to what you have contributed to the nation, and I will back Alan Jones any day of the week. Can I say to you 90 per cent of the rest of Australia would do so at the same time.

Senator Cameron then went on to deni­grate those honest, hardworking Australians who came from all over Australia to make their point of view known. Senator Cameron and his mate Bob Brown attacked the peace­ful gathering out the front. Senator Brown said the convoy, the demonstration, was not much good because it 'has not blockaded anything'. This is not what I usually do. It distresses me to be involved in this sort of debate but I am debating the sorts of things Senator Cameron raised. If he wants to get into that, why doesn't he go back and have a look at his mate Senator Brown's record and see how he got on with the police in some of his demonstrations. You might also trawl along the frontbench of the Labor Party in this chamber and see if you recognise any current senior minister who might have been out the front of the Parliament House before that person was in parliament, knocking down the front door of Parliament House which had to be repaired at a substantial cost to the Australian taxpayer. You might want to have a look at that before you start accusing law-abiding Australians of not knowing how to properly make their point. Sure, law-abiding Australians from regional Australia do not come and get arrested by the police. They do not knock down doors of Parliament House. They try to get their message across to an uncaring, arrogant government and, because they do not get arrested or break some doors, they are called a convoy of no consequence. Madam Acting Deputy President, can I just—

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I draw your attention to the bill we are debating, Senator Macdonald.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am debating Senator Cameron's comments. It is not the way I would usually like to debate this because it is filled with personal invective and that is not me. But if they lead with their chin, they will get it back double.

I sought the protection of the chair. Senator Cameron was trying to kill me with laughter when saying that Peter Costello was not a good Treasurer. Peter Costello left this country $60 billion in credit and turned a $96 billion deficit left by the last Labor govern­ment into this $60 billion credit over a space of 11 years. Senator Cameron says he was a hopeless Treasurer, that Wayne Swan is a beauty. Not only has Wayne Swan spent the $60 billion; he has given us deficits every year he has been Treasurer. We now have a total debt in the vicinity of $150 billion, increasing by millions of dollars each day. To suggest that Peter Costello was an eco­nomic illiterate just does not deserve any further comment.

This bill tries to put some financial responsibility on this totally irresponsible goverment, a government that is irrespon­sible generally but particularly irresponsible when it comes to financial management. Senator Ludlam, you can do a cost-benefit analysis. The Productivity Commission and Infrastructure Australia do it every day of the week. What Senator Ludlam and Senator Cameron and their mates in the Greens and the Labor Party do not want to be demon­strated to the Australian public yet again is that this government is totally incompetent and corrupt when it comes to financial management. The proper analysis that this bill calls for would even more clearly show to the Australian public that this NBN is a financial white elephant.

I conclude by repeating, as I will continue to repeat, that had the coalition proceeded with its plans in 2007 Australia would have had a very fast broadband network up and running today. We still would not be, as we are under Labor, thrashing around trying to put all the pieces in place after the event in getting this white elephant on the way. This is a good bill. It deserves support. Clearly with the Greens and the Labor Party yet again getting together, it is going to struggle to get through. But notwithstanding that I would hope that some of the Labor senators would see the sense and vote for the bill. (Time expired)

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank heavens the time has expired. Senator Birmingham, I think you should be embarrassed to move the second reading of this private senator's bill. If I were him I would be ashamed to admit to even a skerrick of responsibility for this tripe that is barely worth the paper it was written on. He waxes lyrical as if he is some kind of virtuous defender of truth and freedom. He is not a freedom fighter. He is not a fighter for financial transparency. He is a shadow boxer. In fact, it would be fair to say that Senator Birmingham is to financial trans­parency what Port Adelaide are to kicking goals. If Senator Birmingham was serious about financial transparency, why would this bill be drafted as it has been, scrawled on a piece of paper somewhere? Senator Birmingham has presented this shambolic bill to the parliament for one reason and one reason only. The coalition are opposed the National Broadband Network. Let's not forget that when Tony Abbott appointed Malcolm Turnbull as the opposition's communications spokesman, Mr Turnbull's riding orders were to demolish the NBN. In other words, he would demolish the promise of high-speed optic fibre, wireless and satellite broadband access to all Australians; demolish the revolution in health, home and community care, education, social inclusion, entertainment, business and commerce that will ultimately result from this nation-building project; demolish the opportunity to break Telstra's monopoly and deliver true telecommunications competition to Aust­ralian consumers; and demolish any chance that telecommunications consumers in rural and regional Australia have of getting access to fast, affordable, world-class broadband services.

That is what this bill is about—demolition. It is another plank in Tony Abbott's campaign to take a wrecking ball to services in Australia, just like his plans to dismantle GP superclinics, trades training centres and any meaningful response to tackling climate change. It is just another stunt, another delaying tactic in their desperate bid to stop progress on the rollout of the NBN. They want as few Australians as possible to get access to this network because they know that when the possi­bilities of the NBN are realised the oppo­sition will be revealed as the Luddites they are rather than the champions of financial transparency that they pretend to be.

I struggle to hear in any of the contributions of those opposite what their objection is to affordable, fast broadband. It seems to me that their only basis for opposing the NBN is their shame for their own failure to realise the economic and social opportunities it represents. It makes me wonder if they really understand the technology at all. If you asked any member of the coalition, they would probably tell you that broadband is found on a hat, fibre to the home is what you get when you return from the local store with your favourite breakfast cereal and a megabit is what you place in the mouth of an extremely large horse. Should we be surprised that anachronistic neander­thals would want to demolish the NBN? Mr Abbott and the Liberal-National coalition have a one-word vocabulary when it comes to their response to the rollout of nation-building projects and that word is 'no'.

Their penchant for predicting doom and gloom when Labor puts forward a major nation-building project is a tradition that has been handed down through generations of coalition caucuses. For example, when the Labor government in 1992 introduced the superannuation guarantee, the coalition opposed it, predicting that it would not provide ongoing security for retirees and would result in mass job losses across the country—the sky was going to fall. Instead, compulsory super has raised over a trillion dollars in capital for investment in Australia and has dramatically reduced the govern­ment's liability for age pensions. In 1973 when the Whitlam government proposed the Health Insurance Bill setting up the Medibank scheme, now known as Medicare, the opposition referred to it as a socialist scheme that would destroy private hospitals, consume the resources of the country and lower the standards of health care in Austra­lia. The sky was going to fall yet again. The Medicare system has now developed into a cost-effective public system that provides universal healthcare to Australians regardless of their means.

True to their form, we have a Liberal-National coalition opposition that now says no to every positive proposal that is put forward to build the prosperity of our nation: no to the economic stimulus that saved Australia from recession and the projected loss of 200,000 jobs; no to trades training centres and GP superclinics; no to receiving a fair return on the resources that belong to all Australians so that we can boost super­annuation returns and cut income tax for business; no to a price on pollution, the most cost-effective means of achieving real action on climate change; and the bill before the Senate is the opposition's way of saying no to the National Broadband Network.

This is another hollow stunt from an opposition that has more tricks than David Copperfield. You can tell it is a stunt because the member for Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull, has refused to drop his opposition to the NBN even if a cost-benefit analysis comes back overwhelmingly positive about the case for the NBN. You can also tell it is a stunt because most of the information they are seeking is already on the public record. There are thousands of pages of published information on the feasibility, viability and expected commercial return of the NBN. The government has commissioned expert independent advisers, McKinsey and KPMG, to conduct a detailed implementation study of the NBN. McKinsey and KPMG under­took detailed modelling of the revenues and costs that could be expected from the project, given the government's objectives. The implementation study found that the NBN could be expected to pay back the taxpayers' investment with a small return. So, before we even start to factor in any of the economic or social benefits of the NBN, there is already a positive on the cost side of the ledger.

The government also released NBN Co.'s corporate plan in December 2010 which showed, based on conservative assumptions, that the NBN would support uniform national wholesale prices, deliver affordable retail prices and still generate a return that exceeded the 10-year bank rate. In February 2011 we released the Greenhill Caliburn review of the NBN's corporate plan, which found the key assumptions underlying the revenue and cost projections in the plan to be reasonable. Now there has been some work done independently of government on the benefits of the NBN. Access Economics estimated the benefits to telehealth to be between $2 billion and $4 billion a year. A study commissioned by IBM in 2009 found that a fibre-to-the-node network would conservatively boost the net present value of Australia's gross domestic product by between $8 billion and $23 billion over a 10-year period. I should point out that the IBM study considered a fibre-to-the-node net­work, not a fibre-to-the-home network, so we are actually talking about the value of an inferior network to the one we are now building.

So, there are a number of reports on the benefits of the NBN. But any suggestion that you can fully quantify those benefits is pie in the sky, cloud-cuckoo-land thinking. It is kind of like the Postmaster General's Depart­ment laying the telephone network in the early 20th century and trying to predict the emergence of the internet. Anyone who understands broadband knows that increas­ing the speed gives rise to applications that could not have been contemplated before. For example, whoever thought we would have had telemedicine in days when the average internet connection was a 56K dial-up?

We have seen what has happened in other countries when they have tried this exercise. A recent Austrade delegation to Japan was told by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications that they had tried to do a cost-benefit analysis on a fibre-to-the-home network. They projected the value added to the Japanese economy during the period 2011-20 to be 73 trillion yen, or about A$900 billion. Adjusting for Austra­lia's economy, that would be about A$182 billion over the same period. The study only measured the economic value to the telecom­munications companies and other industries that would benefit from the high-speed network being in place. However, when they tried to go one step further and calculate the economic value of the enhancements in the everyday lives of the Japanese people, there were so many assumptions and variables involved that the process defeated them. But I am sure Senator Birmingham, with his crystal ball and tarot cards, could show Japanese economists a thing or two about economic forecasting.

I have come across another report recently, by the Allen Consulting Group. The group conducted a series of targeted focus groups with small businesses and community organisations in the NBN's mainland first release sites: Brunswick, Townsville, Kiama and Armidale. The businesses and com­munity organisations identified a number of opportunities presented by high-speed broad­band such as the ability to sell or market their products online with a greater use of graphics, high-definition video and other multimedia; the potential for tools that enhance person-to-person visual communi­cation to bring groups and individuals together; profiling for television ads based on specific characteristics of the viewer's own browsing and viewing habits as a new way to market products; the use of point of view video technology to enhance online shopping experiences; and the development of smart-phone-like applications and prod­ucts. Perhaps the coalition should have a good look at some of these reports before Mr Abbott and Mr Turnbull start wandering around the streets of Scottsdale, Smithton and Midway Point, in my home state of Tasmania, with a pair of bolt cutters.

Why would the coalition want to demolish and tear up the NBN? Well, it's quite simple: I think they are embarrassed. They are embarrassed because of their poor record on telecommunications in 12 years of government. They are embarrassed about the fact that not only did they develop 20 failed broadband plans throughout both govern­ment and opposition but when Howard left office, telecommunications for consumers in remote and regional Australia had actually gone backwards.

We know the opposition never had a real commitment to decent telecommunications services in rural and regional Australia when they were in government. Let us look at their record. They destroyed services by priva­tising Telstra. How can you have genuine competition in the telecommunications industry when most of the infrastructure is owned by a vertically integrated private monopoly? We all know that it is hard to get true telecommunications competition in regional areas because of the cost of doing business. If we want to deliver quality, affordable services to the bush, we cannot just rely on Telstra to act in the national interest. They are a private company. They have a duty to their shareholders. And we certainly cannot rely on a weak universal service obligation like the one the Howard government put in place. But they went ahead, knowing that their actions would destroy telecommunications services in rural and regional Australia, and they should hang their heads in shame for it.

Perhaps the coalition will just continue their record of privatisation and sell off the optic fibre. After all, they need to sell something to help plug their $70 billion black hole. Anyway, where was their cost-benefit analysis for the privatisation of Telstra? I did not see anyone on that side of the chamber calling for financial transpar­ency back then. I did not see any coalition members ask what that would do to Australia's homes and businesses and to our country's economic development and social inclusion. I know what it did to the residents of Lunawanna on Bruny Island when their public payphone was ripped out and taken away. I know what it has done to the people who have complained to my office that they used to get coverage with the CDMA network and now cannot get coverage with 3G. And I know what the lack of broadband infrastructure is doing when people in the remote areas of the Huon Valley contact my office and say their internet connection keeps timing out. Consumers understand the bene­fits of the NBN. They are voting with their feet: 88 per cent of households have signed up for an NBN connection at the first release site near Armidale; 78 per cent have signed up in Kiama Downs, 62 per cent in Towns­ville and 52 per cent in Brunswick.

Just last month I attended a public forum held by NBN Co. at Kingston Beach, one of Tasmania's second release sites. It was held at a small hall at the Kingston Beach Surf Life Saving Club and 450 people went in and out of that hall during the day, and at times there was barely room to move. That was 450 people in the small suburb of Kingston Beach with questions about the NBN and the possibilities it can offer them in their homes, businesses and community. In fact, I notice that so desperate are Australians to get their hands on an NBN fibre connection that Teresa Gambaro, the federal member for Brisbane, has been calling for the network to be rolled out in her electorate. It appears that the member for Brisbane has broken ranks with her coalition colleagues, who are calling for the NBN to be demolished. Well, the member for Brisbane knows what her con­stituents want, and that is true competition in telecommunications. They want access to optic fibre broadband with speeds of 100 megabits per second or, failing that, wireless and satellite broadband at speeds of 12 megabits per second.

I bet there are plenty of other coalition backbenchers who, despite being pressed into opposing the NBN, know that their constituents are clamouring to get access to it. It is about time they come clean with their constituents and say, 'I'm sorry, I know you want access to fast and affordable broad­band, but we're not going to give you that because our policy is to tear up the NBN.' Or perhaps those like the member for Brisbane should put pressure on Mr Abbott and Mr Turnbull to change their policy and commit to continuing the rollout of the NBN so that every Australian gets the fast, affordable broadband services that they deserve. But what do you expect from the parties that, in government, sold off Telstra and, in doing so, sold out the people of rural and regional Australia and left them with second-rate telecommunications services?

What can you expect when even the Nationals, who purport to stand up for regional Australia, were complicit in the dismantling of Australia's regional communi­cations infrastructure? What can you expect from a coalition that has had 20 failed broad­band plans and still cannot come up with a coherent policy? Senator Birmingham, the Australian people are looking to you for a policy, and the best they can get is an eight-page stunt. And you call it the National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill. Well, your motives are pretty trans­parent to all of us!

You are obviously thinking: 'If we can just delay this project a little longer, perhaps we can stop Australians getting connected to the network and realising the benefit. If we can just delay this project a little longer, maybe we can buy some time and actually come up with a proper policy.' Well, it is a little bit late for that. If the response I saw firsthand at the forum at Kingston Beach is anything to go by, Australians want this network. Against the tide of Australians signing up for fast, affordable broadband, the federal coalition are like stunned deer caught in headlights.

I know Senator Birmingham must have had a few minutes spare while he was waiting for his plane to board at Canberra Airport, and I reckon that if I popped down to the lounge I could probably find a coaster with Senator Birmingham's bill written on the back of it. But real policy is not just about the opposition's favourite pastime, opposing things. That is your favourite pastime. Real policy is actually about pro­posing a constructive alternative, and that is what you fail to do on that side all the time—not 20 alternatives; we do not want 20. We are happy with just one as long as it is decent and reasonable. So, if you on that side want some free advice, I would say that this is a pretty sorry excuse for a private senator's bill. Get together with your colleague Mr Turnbull and put at least the same amount of time into coming up with a broadband policy—or, if that is all a bit too hard, maybe you could get on and support ours. After all, the rest of Australia has.

I notice Senator Bushby is here. I think Senator Bushby and the Tasmanian senators are very aware of what results opposing the NBN had for those on the other side in the last federal election. I am surprised that they have not got the courage to stand up to Mr Abbott and Mr Turnbull and say, 'We need this NBN.' In fact, this bill shows that the only people left in Australia that oppose and do not support fast, affordable broadband are the federal opposition. It is not a bad dream. I know it is taking a bit of time to adapt but, yes, you are actually living in the 21st century. It might take you a bit of time to get used to it, but I would strongly encourage you all on that side to try and get used to it, to move with the times and to acknowledge the benefits of NBN to the whole of society in regard, as I said, to education, e-health, social inclusion and the range of other areas that will make a huge difference to the people of Australia—not just to the people in cities but also to rural and regional Australians.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thoroughly enjoyed the contribution from Senator Bilyk. It was really a bit of a hoot, wasn't it? I particularly liked the bit where those on the other side of the chamber were taking it upon themselves to proffer advice to our side of the chamber, which I really find quite extraordinary given the inept nature of the current Labor govern­ment. But I shall not waste time on that.

We are here today to debate the National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010 (No. 2), and I find it interesting that on no occasion in Senator Bilyk's contribution did she actually try to defend her government on the basis of why they will not inform the Australian people properly about the business case for an NBN and a cost-benefit analysis. On no occasion did Senator Bilyk or anybody else on the other side that I have been listening to actually give a good reason why the Australian people should not be fully informed about the National Broadband Network. This bill was very ably and capably put forward by Senator Birmingham, and I must acknow­ledge Senator Birmingham's diligent work and thorough understanding of tele­communi­cations issues. He has put forward a very sensible bill. I actually think it is one of the most sensible bills we have seen before us in this place for quite some time. It does two things: it requires the publication of a 10-year business case for the NBN and it requires that the NBN project be referred to the Productivity Commission for a thorough cost-benefit analysis. How sensible is that? I think that is absolutely what the government should have been doing anyway.

Can you imagine, colleagues, what would happen if we popped down to our local bank and had a chat to the bank manager about an idea that we had had for a new business venture and said to the bank manager, 'We've got this really good idea; we think we've got this great idea'? 'What's it going to cost?' says the bank manager. We reply: 'We're not really sure. We've got a bit of a ballpark figure but we're not really sure. So we're sorry; we can't tell you.' The bank manager says: 'How's it actually going to work? How's it going to operate?' We say: 'Sorry; we're not really sure. We can't tell you, but it is a really good idea.' The bank manager then says: 'Who's it going to service? How many people is this going to impact upon? What's your return going to be? How long's it going to take?' We say to the bank manager: 'Actually, we're really sorry; we're not sure about any of those things. But it's a really, really good idea, and all we need from you is a bucket of money, so that'd be great, thanks.' It is absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, yet that is exactly what this government has done. Senator Conroy has come up with a bucket of money, because that is all it is: it is an unsubstantiated, unworked-through buck­et of money.

So, having got this bucket of money from the bank manager, the minister is now endeavouring to control this beast that is really becoming out of control. What is the minister thinking if he thinks it is okay not to inform the Australian people about how this NBN is going to work? If that does not smack of the arrogance of this Labor govern­ment at this point in time—as it has been for some time now—it is just extraordinary. If it were not so serious, it would actually be funny, because the government is completely inept.

Why is it that this government will not put forward a business case and do a cost-benefit analysis? It is because they know it is all going to turn into a pile of 'very interesting arrangement'. They know that if they try to explain properly to the Australian people how this is going to work then either (a) they would not be able to or (b) it would look so bad. So they are hiding. It is one of two things. Either they are hiding because they know it is going to be so bad or they simply do not know how this is all going to unravel. It is a bit like letting a train loose on a track without a train driver and saying, 'Well, it's off to a destination somewhere; we're not quite sure what that destination's going to be or what the impact's going to be along the way, but the train's on the track and it's rolling. We in the coalition have always supported faster, better telecommunications for the Australian people. But, unlike the other side, we also have supported doing it responsibly and sensibly, not coming up with some bucket of money, taxpayers' dollars, to put towards some project that has no cost-benefit analysis and no business case. It is just stupidity. If that is the way the government are running the country, which obviously it is, it reflects really badly on this government's ability to substantially and properly determine policy for the future of the country. They simply cannot do it. They simply have no ability whatsoever to do it.

Senator Birmingham's bill is one that should absolutely be passed by this chamber, and I cannot understand anybody not supporting this. It is just sensible. I know that Senator Lundy will have a different point of view because her party has to have a different point of view. I do acknowledge Senator Lundy's very real understanding of these issues. She has a very significant knowledge and capability in this area. I suspect that if I asked her in a corner of a room somewhere, 'Do you really think the NBN is going as well as it could and should it really be like this?' she might have a few thoughts about how it could have been done differently. But I certainly would not want to put any words whatsoever into her mouth. What is going to be interesting, colleagues, is to see whether the Greens and the Independ­ents support the government on this bill. It is going to be very interesting indeed, because all this bill does is ask the government to be responsible and provide the Australian people with the information they deserve about the National Broadband Network.

At the end of the day this is not about a bucket of money of over $50 billion. It is a bit hard to get your head around that. I know the government says, 'It's not over $50 billion; it's only $36 billion', but they very neatly refuse to include the $11 billion that went to Telstra and the cost overruns that are predicted as being very likely. We only have to look at things like the Building the Edu­cation Revolution program to know that the government cannot manage money. There is always waste and mismanagement when it comes to this government, so you need to factor that in. There is not a bucket of money. There is not $50 billion sitting in a giant bucket underneath Parliament House, although from the way that Senator Conroy is going on you would think that there is. This is Australian people's money. This is taxpayers' dollars. This is money that taxpayers of Australia have provided—although I may correct myself there and say that, with the $198 billion worth of debt this government has now given the Australian people, it is probably far more likely it is coming from somewhere else.

What will the Greens and the Independents do? All this legislation does is ask the government to be responsible and to provide the Australian people with the information they deserve when it comes to the government spending $50 billion. If the Greens support the government on this we can only assume that it is another occasion of the operation of the Labor-Greens govern­ment. By and large, that is what we have now; we have a Labor-Greens government. There is no greater example of that than yesterday in this place when we were discussing the cap to the childcare rebate and the fact that there was going to be increased costs to families for child care. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, from the Greens, who in the past had said there should not be any extra impost on families and the government should not be using this as a savings measure, voted with the government to increase childcare costs for families. If that is not the best example of the fact that this is a Labor-Greens government and there is no other way of looking at it, then I do not know what is. I could be wrong, colleagues, but I expect that today in this chamber we will see the Labor-Greens government voting as one again. I hope I am proven wrong and that the Greens in fact realise that this bill is doing nothing more than asking the government to act responsibly, which they certainly have not managed to do in the past.

I must say I have been a little disengaged from telecommunications issues over recent times, but I thought it was timely to make a contribution today, as I did last night with Senator Birmingham in the committee stage, because it is really important for the future of this nation that we get telecommunications right. I suspect that the current minister is not getting it right and I suspect that many people across the country would say: 'Fifty billion dollars—mmm. Okay, how about if some of that went to telecommunications and, if the government has a bucket of money, $50 billion, how about we put that to some other infrastructure use or maybe put that into some health infrastructure?' Let me tell you, as I know from when I am out there in the regional communities talking to people, the level of health service that is given to regional Australia is appalling. But, no, the government is hell-bent on this NBN. It is extraordinary. It is a bit like watching a slow train wreck in a lot of ways.

I could be wrong. We could come back in 20 years and say, 'Gee, isn't it fantastic; the NBN has gone brilliantly!' Not being a soothsayer, I cannot tell; not having a crystal ball, I do not know. But I suspect that we would be standing there saying, 'What an absolutely disastrous mess that turned out to be!' Picking technologies is not smart; that is probably the understatement of the year. Of course there has to be a capacity in the backhaul through the fibre. I do not disagree with that one little bit. That actually should be addressed. That is key to the provision of better services in regional Australia. But for the government to prescribe how it will work from that point on to the home is just absolute stupidity. I note that even this morning NBN Co. has admitted that wireless internet services in some areas could be comparable to the speed of basic services on Labor's fibre network, so it is just extraordinary that the government is continuing down this track. Before I came into this place—it seems a very long time ago now; back in 2005—Senator Joyce and I, who were not actually in this place at that time but were both senators-elect—were asked to co-chair a regional telecommuni­cations inquiry for the Page Research Centre, which was chaired by Dr Troy Whitford. I must say that Dr Whitford has an extra­ordinary intellect. He does indeed have a brain the size of a planet. We worked together with industry to come up with a plan for future-proofing telecommunications in non-metropolitan Australia. I actually think we came up with some pretty good ideas, bearing in mind, colleagues, that this is over six years ago now. While I admit that many of my colleagues did not agree with what we put forward, it was a really sensible plan. We said that competition—where it can exist—is absolutely the vehicle to provide the best telecommunications services for the Australian people but, where there is market failure, the government does have a role to play in ensuring that those areas have equity of service when it comes to telecommuni­cations. So when the minister started talking about the NBN, I had sympathy for some of the principles in that they aligned with this view. But what he has ended up with is an absolute NBN beast that has morphed into an entirely different being from the principle that he started with. What we came up with back in those days—and I notice my good colleague Senator Joyce has joined me now—was a pretty good plan. I am sure my good friend and colleague Senator Ronaldson will again refer to me as an agrarian socialist. He has taken to calling me 'Black Nash McEwen'.

Senator Joyce interjecting—

Senator Joyce has just indicated that is a compliment. There is a role for government to play in ensuring that there is equity of services in telecommuni­cations where we have market failure, but that is not what the government has given us. It is nothing like what the government has given us. So, instead of looking at the urban areas and asking, 'What regulatory reform can we put in place to assist competition in the cities where that is going to have the best possible outcome, where that is going to provide the best services?'—oh no—he has just taken a giant slam, gone straight to the top and gone for the giant, you beaut, super-duper model that is going to be completely out of control.

My great fear is that, once we go through this entire process with the NBN Co., the dealings with Telstra that we have seen and where it is all morphing, in a lot of ways we are going to end up at exactly the same point we started. That, indeed, would be a very, very sad day for telecommunications, because regional communities are still being left behind. After all of this talk and all of this bluster and everything else from this government, regional communities are still being left behind. I note that Senator Bilyk was waxing lyrical in her contribution on the bill about Armidale and the connections—

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

It was waxing lyrical; it was. You had some fantastic phrases in there, Senator Bilyk. I have got to say: I would love to know how you came up with them. Senator Bilyk was waxing lyrical about Armidale. I am not quite sure who gave Senator Bilyk her information about Armidale, but I can assure you, colleagues, about the number of people who have connected in Armidale. Armidale is big. How big is the population of Armidale, Senator Joyce?

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

25,000.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You would think there would be a pretty significant proportion connected in a town of 25,000. You would think maybe 10,000 or maybe 5,000. Fewer than 50 people in Armidale have connected. So I would suggest, Senator Bilyk, that maybe you go back to your speech and have a little look at that particular bit—fewer than 50 people. The bill before us today does nothing more, as I said earlier, than require the government to act responsibly. Senator Birmingham, in his second reading contribution to the bill, said:

... it will give parliament much greater comfort if that transparency—

indeed, the transparency of the NBN—

is a statutory requirement rather than simply a promise from the executive.

I think he is spot on on that one, because we know what this government is like with promises, don't we colleagues? Let me see, what is the most recent promise I can think of that was broken? The biggest one is—I know—the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, saying before the last election: 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' And what have we got now, colleagues? We are looking down the barrel of a carbon tax.

Senator Lundy interjecting—

I notice Senator Lundy is making a contribution from the other side for the first time. I think the government is a little sensitive about this, because they know that there is nowhere they can hide. It was a promise that was made to the Australian people and it was broken—'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' So it is not surprising that the Australian people do not believe the minister, Senator Conroy, when he says: 'Just trust me. It'll be fine. The NBN will be fine. We don't need a business case. We don't need a cost-benefit analysis. It'll be fine. You just trust us.' The Australian people are smarter than that and they deserve better than that. They deserve to have the business case and the cost-benefit analysis that has been put forward through Senator Birmingham's bill. It is just common sense that that sort of information would be available. It is just common sense that the Australian people would be able to have access to the information that they rightly deserve about how the NBN is going to work. Let me tell you, colleagues, this whole 'trust us' thing just does not cut it. The $50 billion that this government is going to spend and how it is going to work need to be plainly and clearly explained to the Austra­lian people. The government should stop hiding. The government should stop complet­ely negating the need for this, because it is quite extraordinary to watch. On this side of the chamber, we understand that it needs to be done. We need better tele­communications, and especially in regional Australia. Senator Joyce and I have been saying that for years and years. But we have got to do it responsibly and sensibly and do it informing the Australian people of what we are going to do about the outcomes they need and deserve.

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is really important to understand exactly where we are going with the National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010 (No.2). This bill is basically to bring about transparency, to let the light in. We are told that the Labor Party has complete confidence in where the NBN is off to. It believes that certain members of its backbench are doing a fine job and it has absolute confidence in what they are doing. This poses the question to the Australian people that we have to make absolutely certain that we have trans­parency in some of these crucial issues.

We have here the largest capital investment in the history of our nation, and a cost-benefit analysis was never done. It is just the most absurd concept that we could go down this path without clearly knowing what we were about to do.

I have an older brother, Michael, a great bloke, and he loves music. He was always buying the latest form of record player, whatever it was. We started with the old—I do not know what it was; some heap of junk parked in the corner of the lounge room and onto that went the Deep Purple records, Cream, the Beatles albums, and that was what it was. Mike was always buying the latest stereo. I remember he once made a large investment in a record player that played a vinyl record with two needles—two styluses on either side. It was incredible. It played both sides of the record and you did not have to turn it over. It was amazing. That technology lasted about six or seven months and then a new piece of technology was invented, a CD player. Those things were so expensive! That was going to be the end; there would be nothing beyond the CD player! That was as good as it was going to get. So people bought a CD player. I look at what my daughter has at the moment: MP3 players and iPods. They are very small.

What the Labor Party have done is make, ultimately, a $56 billion investment in the equivalent of vinyl. They are investing in the vinyl record player. They have no concept of where this is going to go. We understand backhaul; yes, you are going to have back­haul. Fibre backhaul to the node makes a lot of sense. But the world is racing ahead, and it is racing ahead with technology such as wireless, yet the government are locked into a form of technology which the Austra­lian people have to underwrite. As you know, that vinyl record player now is completely and utterly worthless. It is a relic, something for a museum. I do not want to see our nation invested in something for a museum, because then it becomes more of the debt that this nation has to pay for.

We currently have $197 billion of debt and we are about to go on this mad frolic. Every day, the minister comes down here and tells us about the wonders of the NBN. I have heard that, at this point of time, they have 50 customers—they have cracked the half-century! That is great. So the capital cost will be in excess of $50 billion all up by the time you take in the leases, into the future of the product, and at this point of time it is about a billion dollars a customer. That's value for money! That's reasonable! This is a sign of a government that has got it all together!

Then we also had that fiasco in Armidale, where Mr Windsor came up on Ms Gillard's jet with Mr Richard Torbay, the Indepen­dent. They could not go to the university because the university's download speed was actually faster than the NBN could provide, so they formulated a wholesome stage event. It was like Shakespeare had come to Armidale in the form of the opening of the NBN. Do you remember the photo of them all there with the big, cheesy grins? They all put their hands together, they pressed the button and the lights went on. They had seven customers. What was really interesting was that the seven customers were already on. So what happened when they pressed that button? What was the button-pressing all about? The customers were already there. This is a metaphor for how completely and utterly unbelievable they are. It is the same sort of disbelief you feel when you hear them say they are doing a fine job, that they have absolute confidence, that the member will be there for a long, long time. There is nothing that we can really trust anymore.

If we were making this sort of investment of this amount of money, it would be invest­ed in things that I do not think are going to get outdated, such as ports—they do not get outdated; strategic rail and inland rail; and roads. These are the sorts of investments that deliver for our nation and take it forward. But we have compromised all this because we have blown our money on a technology that could so quickly be out of date.

The other thing is that we are buying ourselves a telephone company, a little old telephone company. The problem is that we have already got a couple of them. What is this about? How did we get ourselves once more into this position? One of the promises the Labor Party made with this was that Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott—this is why they put those economic luminaries in power—would give us uniform pricing in the regional areas. The National Party believes in uniform pricing, absolutely. We believe in it so much we moved an amendment to make sure that our people got it. We said: 'Okay, what are we pricing here? Are we pricing a name? Are we pricing the service? What is the essence of the service?' The essence of the service is download speed. That is it; that is what it is all about. So we said, 'If it's uniform pricing, let's make it genuine uniform pricing and have unit pricing on download speed across the nation.' That would be honouring the commitment.

What these sneaky people did was set up three pricing silos. They have the fibre pricing silo; that is for urban Australia. They have the wireless pricing silo; that is for regional Australia. And they have the satell­ite pricing silo; that is for remote Australia. You will find this hard to believe, but they all have different prices! I thought that Mr Windsor, being the honourable person he is—I know he is honourable because he wears elastic-sided boots—would have stood up and said: 'That's outrageous. I gave you government. I demand unit pricing. I demand what I asked for.' But no. He did not vote for it; something else was on that day. Mr Oakeshott, I thought he would have—

John Hogg (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the debate has expired, pursuant to standing orders.