Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

Okay, thank you. Steady on! It is common ground that the NBN should be a wholesale entity—that is apparently part of the scheme—and should not be able to go into the retail space. That is the big idea, as they say. Unfortunately, this is not perfectly achieved, because we have in this bill too many loopholes to enable the NBN—and this is something a number of the telcos have alerted the Senate committee to—to provide services directly to companies who could, as has been pointed out by a number of the telcos, very readily acquire a carrier licence. A bank could do that, or Woolworths or any other large corporation could acquire a licence.

So why is that a problem? It is a problem because, firstly, the object, as we understand it, is that this will be a purely wholesale business. Secondly, we know that the NBN is a very expensive undertaking. It is going to be very heavily capitalised—we say excessively capitalised—but there will be an incredible pressure on it to generate additional revenues. That is inevitable, and that will apply whether the government of the day is Labor or Liberal or whatever; it does not matter. The finance department, the Treasury, will be saying, ‘You have got to find some more cash for us.’ So the natural temptation for the NBN will be to move upstream into retail services. There will be plenty of big companies saying, ‘Look, we don’t want to deal with the middleman. We do not want to deal with Telstra. We just want to do a deal with you.’ There is too much opportunity in the legislation at the moment to enable the NBN to get around that.

So what we are proposing here in amendment (5), in clause 9, is really a belt-and-braces provision to delete that clause which simply says that you cannot supply services to somebody unless they are a carrier or a service provider. It is very easy for a company to get a licence to be a carrier or a service provider and then just provide services to itself. We propose that this be fleshed out so that it says:

(1)

An NBN corporation must not supply an eligible service to another person unless the other person:

(a)

is a carrier or a service provider; and

(b)

will use the eligible service to supply a carriage service or a content service to the public.

Then there is a further fleshed out definition of ‘the public’. I believe that is a critically important amendment and one that has the support of a whole series of players in the industry, both Telstra and Optus and a number of the other carriers. It really is quite consistent with the objects of the legislation and I would encourage the government, and indeed the crossbenchers, to consider this very carefully. It is quite consistent with the objectives of the act.

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