Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lyons for his question and I acknowledge his longstanding commitment to improve broadband access for his constituents. In fact, I recall meeting with his constituents on the very issue on a number of occasions. The agreement that was announced yesterday is a very important step for the telecommunications sector in Australia for microeconomic reform and for the Australian economy, and indeed the Tasmanian economy where the Broadband Network is being rolled out first. I understand that it is supported by none other than the Tasmanian Liberal Party. It is good to see that progress is occurring in Tasmania and in Australia on this vital area of microeconomic reform that is crucial for kick starting productivity growth in the economy and also for reform in our health and education sectors.

It is a crucial reform. In particular, this agreement is critical because of the need to transition from copper to fibre and to ensure that we have a genuinely structurally separated industry where no one telecommunications retailer controls the infrastructure. I first raised the issue of structural separation as shadow minister for communications back in 2002, with the active support of the then Leader of the Opposition, now Minister for Trade. Since that time the Labor Party has been committed to solving what was one of the great public policy disasters imposed on this nation by the Howard government, and that was privatising Telstra without reforming the structure of the telecommunications industry, which therefore left Australia with a totally dominant player, a privately owned monopoly player, in a sector that is rapidly becoming as important to the economy as the financial services sector. Since that time Labor has been committed to ensuring that we have a genuinely productive, efficient, competitive telecommunications industry sector that delivers world class broadband to all Australians and ensures that we have a truly productive, competitive infrastructure and do not have an industry structure that impedes that.

The problem with the stalemate that emerged from the former government is that we had massively complex regulatory arrangements that delivered incentives to Telstra to gain the regulation and to delay innovation and to delay competition and, as a result, Australia progressively fell further and further behind comparable countries in the quality, the speed and the access of broadband that was being made available to our citizens and our businesses. In that scenario, in that stalemate, there was no legitimate prospect of anybody—private or public player—building a universal national broadband network. We had over that period 17 different Howard government broadband plans—

See this speech in context