Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is appropriate, as we are marking the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Howard government, that we do note one of its most critical failures. I think it is important that we note it, because precisely what this failure was and how profoundly it has affected us as a country does not seem to be understood by members of the current government. Of course, I am talking about the absolute failure to prepare the ground or, indeed, to take any action on the establishment of a broadband network in this country. It is quite extraordinary that, after 11 years in government, Prime Minister Howard was still saying—when asked what he was going to do about the provision of a broadband network of the fundamental digital infrastructure that we needed for the modern economy—'We'll wait and see'. Eleven years into the job he was still waiting and seeing what the government of the day would do to establish a broadband network.

When the members opposite get up in this chamber—as they do day after day—and say, 'Look what we've achieved during our 2½ years in government and what you achieved in six years', I say to them, 'Think about the fact that when we took government, towards the end of 2007, it was ground zero.' Absolutely nothing had been done to prepare the way for the development of the broadband network. The government had been completely and utterly unaware of how absolutely critical this was. They had poisonous relationships with Telstra—and I do not entirely blame them for that. I think the three amigos who were in charge of Telstra at the time were very poor choices by that company and they were taking the company in the wrong direction; but the Howard government rejected—and probably quite properly—time and time again the proposals that were coming from Telstra to rebuild the network. In 2005 when Telstra was telling the government that it was 11 minutes to midnight for the copper network, that it was on its last legs, what did they do? They did nothing. They just waited: 'We'll wait and see' and 'We'll wait until the next offer'. And the next offer came back and it was not much better. I think it was offering about eight megabytes, but only in the five major cities—virtually no penetration outside those five major cities.

These offers, of course, were entirely unacceptable. But, then, they needed to do something else. It is not acceptable for a responsible government to just say: 'We don't like that stuff coming from Telstra. That is nonsense. That is not good enough. We don't want to give Telstra the monopoly. We will continue to wait and see if some other private sector proposal comes up. We're not going to take any agency here. We're not going to take responsibility. We're not going to recognise that this nation is behind all of our competitors. We're not going to have the imagination to understand that business in the future will be fundamentally reliant on sound and fast digital infrastructure. We're just going to wait and see. We're going to be some sort of inert blob and wait and see if someone other than Telstra is going to bowl up a successful proposal to us.'

I say to those members opposite: do not come into this House and say that we had six years. When we came into this place not a thing done had been done to establish a broadband network. There was not a piece of infrastructure in place that we could build on. We had to start it. Of course it was very complex. It was going to be a joint private-public sector venture. We were starting from ground zero. There were a few false starts. The first process did not work. But that is not a reflection on poor planning. It was that we were trying to get this thing underway. We tried a particular proposal and that did not work. Then we went back to the drawing board, very promptly, the following year and made the determination that we were going to establish nbn co.

Also at the time, we took the proper decision that we were going to build infrastructure for the 21st century not infrastructure for the 20th century because were nudging up to the turn of the new century. We totally needed to have modern technology. So we made the decision that we would go with fibre to the premises as the fundamental proposition. That is still very much the right proposal.

When the member for Warringah was Leader of the Opposition he was very much of the mode of John Howard—he wanted to wait and see if some private sector company would come along. The current Prime Minister had to persuade him to at least let them go with 'fraudband' or 'broadband lite', which is based on fibre to the node—an increasingly discredited response.

Can I take the members to the report that came out in September last year on the global broadband rankings. We should not be comparing our performance to what we had 10 years ago.

Ms Butler interjecting—

What we have to do, as the member for Griffith says, is look at how we are ranked against the rest of the world. This is not like going to gym, where your gym instructor tells you: 'Don't worry about what anyone else is doing. Just focus on what you're doing and whether or not you've done better than you were doing before.' We do not want that. That is not an appropriate response here. But that seems to have been the response from the government—'We're doing better than we were before.' This is not in the gym. We are in the world economy. We are entering into free trade agreement after free trade agreement and we are telling our community that we have to be globally competitive. We have to go out there and be agile and flexible and compete. But we are being asked to compete with one if not two hands tied behind our back.

Ms Butler interjecting—

The member for Griffith is a very distracting person. If we look at the people we are competing with, if we look at the people we are entering into trade agreements with, we can see that we are not going to be on a level playing field. I am not now talking about the asymmetry that is fundamental to virtually every trade agreement that this current government has entered into. The fundamental infrastructure that we have is increasingly falling behind the other nations. The gap is getting bigger.

We might be doing better than we did last year, but we are not catching up to the rest of the world; indeed, the reverse is the case. We have to worry about how our competitors are doing. It is not like being in the gym. It is a very, very different proposition. Our architects, our engineers, our boilermakers—everyone is competing globally for work. If we do not have the infrastructure, we are just not going to be in the game.

Sometimes I think that we forget that this is not just about manufacturing, though that is very critical for manufacturing. Look at work in the services and all the spruiking we have heard about that from the free trade agreements: 'We might be losing manufacturing—

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