Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Communications (Senator Fifield) to a question without notice asked by Senator Bilyk today relating to the National Broadband Network.

As a matter of interest, about an hour ago a wonderful staffer from my office, Rhys, posted a speech that I gave about the NBN in this place just the other night. In the space of one hour, ladies and gentlemen, this is the sort of comment that I have had:

the nbn is a joke - took time off work to accommodate the technician who arrived then announced that there was no signal at the pole and that he would be back later in the day plus that he would call - none of which happened

Here is another comment:

Not only does it have inherent problems, but you have to sign a waiver saying that the retailer cannot be held to any guarantee of service, as it's not their fault if the infrastructure has problems.

And another:

Never able to converse with anyone at the NBN...they are scarce as hens teeth. Constantly dropping out..slower than dial up..that is if you are lucky enough to get a connection.

And this comment comes from a woman in the wonderful suburb of Kariong:

I don't know if im lucky we in Kariong will not have it for two years so I've been told.

The people who do not have the NBN that this government is rolling out are indeed lucky, because the market refused to provide additional funding to the NBN, which is the promise that this government went to the election on. The market knows what this government is trying to hide from ordinary Australians. The NBN that it is building is a lemon. The NBN taking fibre to a node and then forcing it down a copper pipe to your house is like shooting a superhighway to somewhere near you and then forcing you onto an information goat track in the last century. It simply is not working.

For those comments to arrive in the space of just an hour means there will be hundreds of them in a couple of hours. There are hundreds of people contacting my office on the Central Coast, where this live experiment in making Australians able to participate in the global economy, where they need the internet at genuinely high speeds—100 down, 25 meg up—is not being delivered. This government decided that 25 meg down and five up was going to be enough. That was never going to be enough, and the market knows it. That is why the government are ashamed and embarrassed by the fact that, while they put a $29.5 billion cap on equity, they have to go for public funding of $19.5 billion, as is declared on the Prime Minister's own website, to make sure that their dog's breakfast of an NBN goes ahead.

We should not really call it the NBN, because it is not what people were going to get. Under Labor they would have got fibre to the home, fibre to the business—fibre to give them real opportunities to change how they do business and how they use technology right across this country. I heard from a farmer who has made a half-million dollar investment in wonderful technology. His internet capacity is so poor he has a $500 debt. That is a liability that he cannot even use.

That is the kind of future that we see from this government for their NBN. It is not the NBN: it should be called what it is—Malcom Turnbull's Mess: the MTM. That is what we have: a dog's breakfast of combined different technologies. Fibre to the node—now they have figured out it is so bad that they decided they will go a little bit more fibre, so they are going to propose to bring fibre to your kerb instead of the fibre to the node. It will be a bit closer to your house, but it will still be copper from the kerb to your house, and that is where the problem is. The HFC network—at the beginning, our great innovation Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the Minister for Communications who made this happen, said it was going to be a fantastic thing to have HFC. He was going to use the Foxtel line into your house. They bought it, and they have not been able to use it. Millions of dollars have gone down the trap. The market knows—the market would not invest in this dodgy and disgraceful piece of infrastructure, which is selling Australia's future down the river. It is a failure at every single turn.

The number of complaints that I have received is nothing by comparison with what has been received at the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's office. Complaints about the NBN are coming through thick and fast. What are those complaints about? This is the government that promised faster, cheaper, sooner. We should have all had it by 2016—we have not got it. It was going to be cheaper—they said they could do it for $29.5 billion. Now they have had to back it up with taxpayers' money of $20 million just to keep it going. They said it was going to be faster. This is the complaint. The number of complaints of slow data speed, unusable services and dropouts has increased by 147.8 per cent nationally. That is why they could not get investors for their NBN. (Time expired)

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was almost a manic contribution. I often find myself in the position these days of having to devote so much of my time to pastoral care of our friends on the other side, to try to educate them. You can reject it—it is a feature of ignorance. I am about to let you know the real story in relation to the NBN. The other thing is that I made the comment only yesterday: farmers everywhere—people who live west of the Great Divide, people who live in provincial parts of the state—should break out in a cold sweat every time someone from the Labor and/or Greens coalition starts to talk about their interests. To be honest, I will bet you London to a brick it has been a long time since you have driven any more than 20 minutes where there have not been four lanes, Senator.

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

You are condescending!

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is my experience in the bush.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bilyk, on a point of order?

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

I am not sure which senator Senator O'Sullivan was referring to, but if he is not sure, three of the Labor senators in the room come from Tasmania. We would be lucky to get any four-lane highways.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is a debating point.

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To clear up the point for Senator Bilyk, I was referring to all four of them. The situation we have is that for decades the question of communications in the bush was ignored completely through the entire term of the Australian Labor government. I have met with dozens of families who reported to me that they had to get up in the early hours of the morning so they could just do a transaction with their accountant or a business transaction or simple search on the internet. I had many old-timers tell me—I remember one in particular when I was going through Birdsville, but it was consistent with reports that I was getting right across my own state of Queensland—that the School of the Air was more efficient that the communications system that had been provided to them under the former Labor government.

The stories and the accounts that I get from the bush are completely different to the one or two little exercises undertaken by the previous speaker. We now have the Sky Muster satellites, and that brings great promise to the bush. People are reporting now that they are able to function, particularly around the scope of education and delivery of health care. For example, we have had entire surgical units set up with the capacity to provide rural health services, which had not been able to function until this government came to power and brought the NBN on line with Sky Muster. They could not use the equipment. They had state-of-the-art equipment but they could not connect or communicate. So the story that I get as I move around my home state of Queensland is completely different to the story just provided.

It is a question of us rolling this out. If you go back to some of the figures, we are now on track to connect 1.2 million services this year. For the first four months there were 400,000 new customers. So if you want to have a conversation about how the market is responding, we are happy to have that conversation—400,000 new customers in four months, which is 100,000 customers a month. It is an increase. We added another 613,000 in the last financial year, so that will be 1.8 million Australians who will go on in just on two years with our rollout of the NBN. When you compare that with what was happening under Labor it is not hard to make the statistical comparison, because absolutely nothing was happening.

This was a multibillion dollar brainstorm when Labor dealt with it. I am sure the people in the gallery will be absolutely shocked to understand that the entire structure of the NBN, when the Labor government was in control of it, was done on the back of a napkin. We have all drawn on the back of a napkin—

George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thought it was a beer coaster.

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am sorry—on the back of a beer coaster—and we have all made annotations on the back of a beer coaster. You come here today to criticise this government, which is very organised. This government has absolutely exceeded all expectations in the rollout of the NBN. The rollout of the NBN will make the bush in Australia much more productive and, socially, a much better place to live, which is inconsistent with previous contribution.

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

Very mediocre, Senator O'Sullivan. I rise to take note of the answers given by Senator Fifield to questions on the National Broadband Network. This is the latest chapter of the ongoing farce that is the rollout of the government's second-rate copper network, or the MTM network, as they call it. Those opposite tell us that MTM stands for multi-technology mix, but we all know that people out in the community are saying all the time that it really stands for 'Malcolm Turnbull's mess'.

Is it any surprise that Australian taxpayers are now forking out for this NBN budget blow-out. Three years ago, Mr Turnbull's and Mr Abbott's decision to roll out a second-rate copper network was going to cost $29.5 billion and be delivered to every home and business in Australia by the end of—guess when—this year, 2016. What a joke that was. The timetable for the rollout has blown out to 2020, which is four years later than the government promise, while the total cost of the network has almost doubled. The budget for purchasing new copper wire blew out by more than 1,000 per cent. That is enough copper wire to connect Brisbane to Beijing or Perth to Pakistan. What are you guys doing on that side? You need to sharpen your pencils, as my dear friend would say.

While the Turnbull government has been rolling out its second-rate network, Australia's average peak broadband speed has fallen from the 30th to the 60th fastest in the world, and by the time the network has been rolled out it will be obsolete, according to technology experts. On top of all these failures we learn that taxpayers will have to fork out $19.5 billion for a loan to complete Mr Turnbull's second-rate copper network, despite the government insisting for the past three years that the project has an equity cap of $29.5 billion. This is a backflip of epic proportions. As recently as May this year, both Senator Cormann and Senator Fifield were insisting that the government equity cap was $29.5 billion and that the remaining funding would have to be sourced from external markets. What makes this backflip especially farcical is that the government's original equity cap promise is still featured on the Prime Minister's website. Someone had better tell him. He needs someone in his office, given all the staff there, to make sure that they keep the website up to date.

There are still many unanswered questions about the government's $19.5 billion NBN bailout. There are questions such as: was the government advised that private lenders were lacking confidence in the coalition's NBN and the long-term liability of using copper? What did NBN recommend to government after receiving its underwhelming AA-minus credit rating? And what did the Department of Finance and the Treasury recommend to cabinet? Taxpayers have a right to know why $19.5 billion of their money has been needed to save this flagging project from the Turnbull government's mismanagement. All we can conclude from this backflip—the only reason why the government would have to bail out the NBN—is that private investors do not want to touch Mr Turnbull's second-rate copper network. They know that they would be being sold a lemon. According to a US telecommunications analyst, Point Topic, over 89 per cent of new global access network connections between the first quarter of 2015 and 2016 were fibre to the premises. To illustrate how out of date the government's second-rate copper network is, two-thirds of fixed-line NBN customers are already opting for the maximum 25 megabits per second speed tier, or higher speeds where they are available.

The NBN is now accounting for almost 12 per cent of complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, even though the NBN comprises less than four per cent of fixed and mobile internet services. No wonder private investors are turning their nose up at the government's second-rate copper network. They want to invest in a 21st century broadband technology, not 20th century copper. Instead, it has been left to the Australian taxpayer to save what was once a world-leading project, which, under Mr Turnbull's watch, has become the worst infrastructure disaster in our nation's history. It is like you started off with a Ferrari, you have been adding bits to it from a Kingswood and then you have crashed it into the wall. (Time expired)

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to address some of the points raised by members in the opposition in response to answers given by the Minister for Communications. As a South Australian senator, I do take exception to the comments about a Kingswood which imply that the Kingswood is somehow a poor car. I think Holden has actually produced some very good cars, and I would have thought the Labor Party would have appreciated that.

The point that we really do need to highlight is that the Labor Party, yet again, are highlighting their lack of understanding of commercial reality. Members opposite have just been talking at length about the Prime Minister's website and the discussions on there around equity caps. For people who have been involved in business, they clearly understand that equity implies ownership. If you have equity in something, you have some ownership of it. Whereas, if you provide a loan, the loan means that there is a debt that the company has to repay and, yes, you have an interest. But, if it is on commercial terms, it is not ownership; it is not equity. That is quite commonly understood in the world of business. I will talk a little bit further about that, but it is important to highlight that the Labor Party has form on this kind of misunderstanding.

Much of my work in this place relates to Defence and defence procurement. We are working hard at the moment to try and keep a sustainable shipbuilding industry in Australia. During some of the discussions in this place around why the value of debt has occurred where we have seen shipbuilding workers being laid off in South Australia, I was flabbergasted to hear what members opposite—those with an association with the portfolio—said when answering the very telling question as to why the Labor Party in the six years that they were in government did not commission a single ship to be built in Australia's shipyards. Their answer in this chamber and in the other place was that the shipyards were already full of work. They were already busy so they did not have to commission anything. What that shows is a complete lack of understanding of the fact that in the real world, where designs have to be approved and contracts have to be negotiated, there a whole bunch of enabling steps required before you can commence a large project.

Six years of inaction was excused by those opposite with a throwaway comment that the yards were full. Why were they full? They were full because the coalition government, under Prime Minister Howard, had commissioned the shipbuilding projects that were occurring during the time of the previous Labor government—both the LHDs and the air warfare destroyers—with the lead time of four to five years between the decision and work actually starting. So if there was any commercial understanding from members opposite, they would have realised that, in order to avoid the layoff of workers, you actually have to do those enabling steps. So with that kind of history and the dire consequences it has had for that workforce around Australia and in South Australia in particular, it does not surprise me to hear the complete lack of understanding on this very basic financial issue around the difference between equity and making a loan.

In constrained financial times I would have thought that the Labor Party would have welcomed what the average person on the street would recognise is wise financial management. Let us take a simple example: if you go to a bank and seek a loan to buy a house and they offer you an in interest rate but you can go to a different provider and get a better interest rate, then that is clearly where you are going to go. In this case, the government is able to seek debt funding at a better rate than NBN were able to seek debt funding through another provider. So, looking for every way to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money, this government has taken the sensible decision—in fact, respected business journalist John Durie has described this decision as a smart use of the cheapest source of funds—whereby the government is making a loan on commercial terms to the NBN. So the cap remains. Our equity remains in accordance with the statements that we have consistently made, but we are being good stewards of taxpayers money by making sure we get the best deal available in terms of the cost of capital to the NBN. (Time expired)

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

I also rise to speak on the motion to take note of answers by the Minister for Communications, Senator Fifield, on the government's latest broadband backflip. This one is remarkable. The government's decision to complete the NBN rollout through a $19.5 billion government loan is a complete backflip on everything it has been saying for the past three years. It shows that Mr Turnbull's second rate copper-reliant broadband network could be uncommercial and unviable. I want the government to succeed on the NBN. The people of Australia need the government to succeed on the NBN. But every backflip comes with a risk that a previous position could be next up for a change of heart. With every backflip there is a risk that there is information the government and NBN are hiding—that the backflip is only ever part of the story.

A message that we have been delivering consistently for years is that the Australian people deserve, and the Australian people need, fibre-to-the-premises broadband. We have been saying do it once, do it right, do it with fibre. This Prime Minister has not listened, and now he and his minister are contradicting each other on this latest development. On one hand we have Minister Fifield promising that there is a cap on the government's equity contribution to the NBN of $29.5 billion but there is not a cap on the government's total contribution; on the other hand, we have the Prime Minister who on his website states that there will only be public funding of $29½ billion, which of course has blown out now, with this extra $19½ billion from the taxpayer. The latest development demonstrates that the Prime Minister and Minister Fifield have lost control of the NBN project.

In my home state of Tasmania, I have been working with the communities on the west coast, in Queenstown, Zeehan and Rosebery, to secure at least the second-rate fibre-to-the-node service. We made the case that the satellite service was inappropriate and pressured the minister, the Prime Minister and the former member for Braddon to acknowledge the need for fibre broadband to the west coast and to match Labor's commitments to these communities. But, of course, months after the election there is confusion for who is responsible for what and frustration with yet further delays.

The west coast has long been the main exporter earner for the Tasmanian economy, bringing millions of dollars to the state through mining, forestry and tourism. However, a reliance on resource based industries presents serious risks in the future, and the region really needs to build other industries. That is why it is critical for governments at the federal, state and local level to work together. The west coast developed a west coast community plan for the next 10 years. They did that in consultation with the entire community. The section on the economy identifies the need to improve access to broadband and wireless technologies to support a sustainable, dynamic and resilient business model. Broadband is also important to the region for health outcomes and education, allowing people to receive important and sometimes life-saving emergency treatment and to gain an education without having to leave the region. That is really important for the west coast, because sometimes during the winter it gets snowed in and it is inaccessible, and people need to be able to access this information to get to school for their education, and businesses need it, and they need a proper program.

Labor is focused on working with the communities on the west coast to improve their communications services. We need the Turnbull Liberal government to set a clear path for the NBN, to stop all the uncertainty and to stop the regular backflips, because with every backflip comes a risk that the previous position, such as rolling out fibre to the west coast, could be up for the next change of heart. With every backflip there is a risk that there is information the government and NBN are hiding.

So I urge the Prime Minister and the minister to come clean on the government's financial support to NBN. Come clean on exactly what this means for the project in the future. I urge the Prime Minister and the minister and NBN to work with the Tasmanian government and the West Coast Council to lock in broadband rollout for the west coast, to meet their election commitments for the people of Queenstown, Zeehan and Rosebery. Stop hiding behind half-truths and clarify your exact position on the finance of the project so that those people can get on with their lives, get on with getting a good education and get on with attracting new businesses to the area so that they can become self-supporting and long-term sustainable into the future. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.