Ken Ticehurst (Dobell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for New England probably has not been involved in submitting too many tenders, but I can tell you that I have won more tenders with alternatives to the specifications than by just blindly following the specs. You need to be a bit creative.

We have heard our opponents over there talking about fibre to the node. It is great technology. We heard the member for Melbourne talk about there being no need for exchanges, but, if you have a node, you have to have two ends of a cable—and one end actually starts at an exchange. I have not seen any exchanges being demolished as broadband has been rolled out. Providing fibre to the node to 98 per cent of Australians is totally ludicrous. It is unaffordable in this country, as it is in many other countries. It is expensive. The $4.7 billion that the ALP have put up in their policy is probably about a quarter of what the real cost would be.

Fibre to the node is probably great for the cities. I am four kilometres from the Berkeley Vale telephone exchange, and there is no way in the world that I would ever expect to get a fibre cable into my house. Even if it were fibre to the node, the nearest node would probably be three kilometres away and the rest would be overhead cable, as it is today. I would not expect that to happen any time soon. If you want to have really good high-speed broadband, fibre to the home is really what you need. That happens in a number of American cities, but I am quite sure the ALP are not actually proposing that. So we still need cables from nodes to connect to houses.

The other day the member for Hotham was talking about the government having a bandaid solution that is flawed. I do not think he has read the solution put forward by OPEL. The member for Hotham said:

Wireless does have a role to play in connecting mobile consumers, but it must be used to compliment a fixed line broadband network.

I think the member for Hotham ought to have a look at what we do these days—and have been doing for many years—with wireless. We have TV, radio and pay TV—which is delivered by satellite in many cases—delivered by cable. Our major power transmission lines are controlled by wireless. It is microwave technology. We also have microwave technology as the backbone for communications systems. One company is running a backbone internet from Cairns, through Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, to Adelaide—again wireless. We have mobile phones—a huge application of wireless. We have IP networks coming up in houses, schools and businesses. So wireless is certainly not a second-rate technology. It just shows that Labor does not understand the technology.

As Barry Cohen, a former member of the Whitlam government, once said: ‘The problem with Labor is that they are ex-union, ex-staffers and ex-lawyers. How can they be expected to make technology? They haven’t really been involved in the real world.’ Let us have a look at Labor’s record on communications. There was the mobile phone fiasco, which the minister mentioned earlier. We also had AMPS, which was a system that was developed in the USA for long range and rural. Australia had a similar need, but Labor dumped AMPS and adopted GSM. Why did they adopt GSM? It was a European system, and there were GSM technology companies in Australia, in Sydney and Melbourne, with large union membership. So why wouldn’t the unions want to maintain the technology that employed more of their existing members? It took the Howard government to come into office and introduce CDMA. That was American technology. Even today we see that Telstra’s Next G is a wideband form of CDMA. Labor have no technical backing for their proposal. They have cobbled it together. The Deputy Prime Minister labelled it ‘fraudband’—and that is exactly what it is.

The other issue we need to look at is: what is Telstra doing? We have ADSL2+ capability in many exchanges, but they are not enabled. Customers of mine tell me that Telstra says, ‘We won’t enable those exchanges until we have a competitor come in and install their equipment in those exchanges.’ So we have Sol Trujillo out there trying to blackmail the government, trying to stand them up and trying to be a bully boy. It would appear that he has got into bed with Labor somewhere along the line on their proposal, because he has been waffling on about fibre to the node. We already have capability in this country to run ADSL2+. When OPEL get started, we will just see how long it is before Telstra realise that they are not going to have a monopoly in this field and that they really have a competitor.

Mr Les Wozniczka, the CEO of Futuris—the company that owns Elders—said that 80 per cent of the funds that they are employing are actually for fibre back-haul because, if you are going to run ADSL2 in exchanges and you are going to have WiMAX towers, you need a good, reliable fibre back-haul. It is a long-term scaleable proposal. Initially, they will be looking at 12 megabytes, going to 20 megabytes. In the longer term it can extend to 50 and 70 megabytes. Telstra are talking about similar figures with Next G as the technology improves and develops over the years. The opposition have not even spoken to Elders. So where do they get their solutions from? The member for Hunter really let the cat out of the bag when he was asked whether his region would miss out. He said:

Well those things are yet to be tested; we will roll out fibre to the node right throughout the Hunter region. Obviously there may be some people excluded from that. We haven’t … don’t have the technical backing to make those final conclusions.

So we have a half-baked proposal from Labor, which the member for Hunter enunciated. So then we look at Labor’s other claims. How are they going to do it? Where is it going to be? What is it going to be composed of? What is the cost? We have heard that it is going to be 2013 before the plan is implemented.

If we look at the history of the government’s performance in telecommunications, we see that, since 2001, 4.3 million homes and small businesses have been connected to broadband. The price has dropped over 65 per cent over that period. In regional Australia, 1.3 million connections have been made available with $500 million of subsidies. Broadband Connect was introduced in July 2006 and we also have the Australian Broadband Guarantee program. The member for New England was a bit concerned about the one per cent who will not be connected either through ADSL or the WiMAX system, but we have satellite. Satellite is not a new technology; it has been around for many years. If you drive around the cities and the towns, you can see satellite antennas bringing in pay TV. The same technology can be used to bring in broadband—in fact, it is being used.

There are also areas of competition. The government believe in competition. Telstra itself provides many competitive products. It has fibre, ADSL, Next G and satellite. In the area of Dobell and on the Central Coast, we have two wireless providers. One is a company called Cirrus. Cirrus, in conjunction with Motorola, are installing WiMAX. We have another company, Central Coast Internet, and they are using a different wireless technology. The capabilities of these two networks are quite different. We have spoken to Central Coast Internet and Cirrus about providing wireless communication into some black spot programs. They have a solution that will fit a little group in Wyoming of about 100 users. They will not be able to get WiMAX because of the terrain, but the technology used by Central Coast Internet can be adapted into that area. So it is not a case of one solution that fits all. It is not just fibre to the node; that is just one part of the solution. There are whole ranges of technologies that can be used to provide wireless, fixed line, satellite and broadband in many other areas. Labor need to do their homework, get their policy out and provide some detail. Let’s see what you’ve got and let’s do some real costing. Their $4.7 billion is an absolute joke, and to raid the Future Fund to provide that service is, as the Treasurer said, just one little chink in the armour to break down the whole application of the Future Fund.

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