Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, since the member for Wentworth mentioned it, he knows perfectly well that he came to the committee with half-baked amendments full of square brackets saying, 'I will insert something here when I think about what to put in here.' So he should not come in here and make those assertions. Secondly, we waited about 10 minutes for him to give his usual spiel without even talking to the bill. As the member for Lyne said when he introduced the advisory report earlier today, the disagreements in this committee and in this report on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011 actually come down to a question of policy and ideology more than anything else. That is borne out by the fact that we have had to sit here for the last half-hour and listen to the member for Wentworth say the same rhetoric he has said on every single occasion, crying these tears for affordability.

What did they do? What did he do when he was a member of a government which saw Australia going down the gurgler with respect to broadband rankings around the world? Australia became an absolute backwater in terms of internet accessibility and high-speed broadband. It has taken this government to pick up the mantle and actually turn that around. We know why he is saying these things. We know it is in his remit. We know that is his job. The sole purpose of him coming in here today and spending half an hour just bagging out the NBN is that he has been given the remit to destroy the NBN. On this point, I found he actually felt and looked rather uncomfortable on this occasion because he talked about HFC being available. He knows perfectly well that only 30 per cent of the country is covered by it and even then that is only if you are lucky enough to live on the eastern seaboard around metropolitan areas. He knows perfectly well when he mentions the United States that they have had a long history of ubiquitous cable investment. He talks about South Korea and again he knows perfectly well that the reason South Korea has become the internet economic miracle is government intervention and acceptance a decade ago of the need for broadband development. What were we in Australia doing in that time? Absolutely nothing.

The member for Wentworth talks about the value of broadband being in the applications rather than speed. Absolutely true, but the fact is that in order to deliver those applications you need bandwidth. Without bandwidth they are absolutely nothing. The member for Wentworth talks about facilities based competition. That is fine, but we know from not only the analyses that have been done by the ACCC since 1997 but also in the lead up to the NBN being announced that facilities based competition in Australia has failed. Why has it failed? Because Telstra as the incumbent operator was a vertically integrated company controlling both the wholesale and the retail levels, so the market failed.

What happens when markets fail? What do Labor governments do? We step in when the market fails and we rectify that failure. The member for Wentworth talks yet again about Australia going it alone on what it is doing in this area. I remind members that one of the key regulatory principles is that regulations should be specific to the needs of each country. What is the need for Australia right now? The need is to connect a country of vast geography and differing topology and a country which has definite broadband black spots that have not been addressed.

You do not have to take it from me. Take it from the ITU Secretary General of the United Nations, who visited Australia only in April this year and made the following comment:

Australia is a different country. Its geography and spread of the people, the level of telecommunications development and the level (of competition) between the operators—I will not say which one is a giant or not—all of those conditions, you do not find them elsewhere and therefore you do need to have the guts to tackle the problem.

That is exactly what this government is doing. Finally, the member for Wentworth constantly wants to throw around the word 'monopoly'. As everyone knows, the NBN is a wholesale-only network. How will it deliver competition to consumers? It does that by disinfecting the wholesale level so that the vertical integration disease is obscured to the extent that we can regulate the wholesale level and give a level playing field to retail operators with equivalent pricing and terms.

Now that I have dispensed with the member for Wentworth, I turn to the bill itself. This is a critical piece of legislation for the development of the National Broadband Network, particularly for the estimated nearly two million new premises that will be constructed across Australia during the rollout phase. The passage of this bill will provide something vitally important for all stakeholders including industry, consumers, local government and developers. What is that? It is certainty. For homebuyers, there will be certainty that their new dwelling will be fibre ready. For developers, there will be certainty as to their obligations to ensure ducts and lead-in are fibre ready.

I turn to some practical context of the bill. The practicalities of this bill are certainly not lost on me. While I doubt there will be substantial greenfields development in some electorates such as Wentworth and Bradfield in the immediate future, this is not the case in respect of west and north-west Sydney. During my time as a representative on Blacktown City Council and as its Deputy Mayor, I was party to decisions on many new development approvals and subdiv­isions. I am on the record as an advocate for the notion that, just as the local government planning and approvals process takes into account community needs such as parks, sporting amenities and childcare centres, access to advanced communication services must be viewed as an essential service with infrastructure backing that is akin to sewerage and electricity and made a condition of consent.

I have witnessed first hand—and too many of my constituents are living it today—the consequences of underinvestment in advanced communications infrastructure in our new greenfields estates. For many residents in suburbs such as Kellyville Ridge, The Ponds and even Stanhope Gard­ens in Glenwood, their primary reason for contact and advocacy with my office concerns their inability to access what are now regarded as entry level broadband products such as ADSL2+.

Even in older estates in Greenway, which were once greenfields or even brownfields developments, such as specific streets in the well-established suburb of Kings Langley, access to high speed broadband is a challenge. The timing of this particular dev­elopment meant that the Foxtel cable rollout passed by this area. This is not, as the member for Wentworth has attempted to assert on just about every occasion, a consequence of an income barrier. It is amusing enough that this furphy is being peddled by the same person who ran a fantastic dial-up ISP, which he sold in the dotcom boom and made either a cool $60 million or $40 million, according to recent reports—but who is counting? No, this lack of access is the consequence of chronic underinvestment in communications infrast­ructure in greenfields estates. You only need to look at the median house prices in Kings Langley, Kellyville Ridge and The Ponds, which are $545,000, $588,000 and $596,000 respectively, to understand that this is not merely a question of income. When one examines the electoral divisions ranked by the proportion of households with a broadband internet connection, there is not a single regional electorate with a percentage of households with broadband connections above 50 per cent. Indeed, far and away the tyranny of distance when it comes to broadband accessibility is borne out by the fact that nearly every rural and regional electorate lies in the bottom half of the scale. I am yet to receive an answer from anyone on the opposite side of the House explaining to me what they did over all their years in office to improve broadband development and accessibility for households in suburbs such as Mt Druitt, to develop broadband as a tool for social inclusion in disadvantaged regions or even to create a comprehensive policy for greenfields development. As an example of how confused their policy has been on this issue, one only needs to look at the so-called 'real action' plan they took to the last election. On page 4 of that policy it is stated:

The Coalition will conduct an urgent review of whether to mandate that all 'greenfields' connections must be fibre.

That leaves it up in the air whether there should be a fibre mandate, as opposed to copper, in new developments. Yet on page 17 of that same policy it states:

The Coalition believes that new dwellings should have a fibre connection rather than a copper connection.

So even in their own policy, the one they took to the last election, they could not make up their minds on their position. This confusion from those opposite continues in their ill-conceived proposed amendments to this bill, which I will happily deal with in the consideration in detail stage. In the mean­time, I note that page 42 of the dissenting report into the bill, which was tabled earlier today, states:

… the evidence the inquiry received demonstrates that there is a vigorous private market for the construction of fibre infrastructure in new developments.

The dissenting report goes on to say that the bill will end all that. That is simply not true. There is vigorous competition which will remain with the bill in effect. The change will be that the competitors will compete to provide fibre installation to NBN Co. rather than to developers. Instead of developers extracting an economic rent, consumers will not pay for fibre connectivity of itself. They will pay for what they use from a retail service provider providing services using the NBN. The constructors will obtain a normal return. The change is that there is no arbitrage opportunity, which those opposite, who like to say they are champions of competition, should embrace. No arbitrage opportunity and no abnormally high rents—the effect is good for consumers.

I turn to that part of the bill dealing with the proposed access regime—the proposed part 20A of the Telecommunications Act. I would like to make the point that the proposed regime is based on existing provisions in schedule 1 of the Telecomm­unications Act, none of which are novel. It provides a regime for carriers to secure access to fixed line facilities owned by non-carriers in order to ensure that fibre can be rolled out using these facilities. So it is indeed based on the existing schedule 1 of the Telecommunications Act. Access can be on terms that are commercially agreed or, failing agreement, one can agree on an arbitrator. The default arbitrator will be the ACCC. So, as can be seen, the access regime is completely in line with existing competition provisions under the Telecommunications Act itself.

The outcomes of this bill will be early and less costly access to fibre based broadband for residents of new developments, reduced costs for deploying fibre by ensuring that the ductwork infrastructure is indeed fibre-ready, reduced costs for deployment of fibre through access to non-carrier duct as well and cabling for new premises which ensures they can take advantage of the NBN. All of these things are well understood by consum­ers. They understand that the definitive agreements, signed the other week, between Telstra, Optus and NBN Co., mean that we will be able to fast-track using existing facilities and existing infrastructure in the most efficient way possible. This is well understood in my electorate, where River­stone is the site of the first Sydney metro rollout. The question I continually get there is not, 'Why we are doing this?'—not the question that the member for Wentworth seems to believe consumers keep asking over and over again. They are not asking why; they are asking when. It cannot come soon enough for these areas of west and north-west Sydney, which have suffered from chronic underdevelopment.

I turn now to the issue of NBN Co. operating as the wholesale provider of last resort. There is strong stakeholder support for this. It supports a consistent national approach in the future and, if alternative providers wish to compete with NBN Co., they are welcome to do so. I will finish by talking briefly about some of the proposed amendments. I could not resist the notion put forward by the member for Wentworth about NBN Co. being forced somehow to buy network from other providers. What is actually being proposed here is that a developer will arrange for NBN Co. to purchase that part of the network from the fibre provider. This is highly problematic. It seems to suggest the developer can force NBN Co. to buy another person's asset without their permission. That raises issues about acquisition of property.

I will end on that note, but I also particularly want to draw the House's attention to the significance of 20 July. Everyone should be putting that date in their diaries. On that day, the shadow minister will be addressing a CEDA forum on the topic 'Broadband Vision for Australia: The Opposition's Perspective'. This will be a pretty short speech. If you want to go to it, it is $270 a head, but I am happy to save any member here $270 and 10 minutes of their time by pointing out that we already know what the opposition's policy on broadband is—it is to destroy the NBN. The member for Wentworth has demonstrated that that is his remit and that that is what he will be trying to do. (Time expired)

See this speech in context