David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Melbourne proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The Government’s failure to deliver highspeed broadband services for Australian businesses and consumers

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There can be no bigger, no greater emblem of just how tired and out of ideas, how bereft of initiative the Howard government has become in its now 12th year in office in this country than the appalling state of broadband infrastructure and services that Australian businesses and consumers have to tolerate. While the rest of the world is streaking ahead and moving into ever faster speeds, ever more accessible and ever cheaper systems, we in Australia are still crawling along in the kilobits lane. Not too many other countries now talk about kilobits, but we are still in the kilobits lane when it comes to broadband.

There are many Australians, and not just people living in very remote isolated areas, who cannot get broadband at all. They simply do not have the capacity to access the service, let alone access a fast, reliable broadband service of the kind that in many other developed countries is increasingly taken for granted as a routine part of the services that all businesses and all families require to go about their daily lives and their businesses. Many people and many businesses literally have to fight to get access to broadband, and when they do—if they do—they are often paying prices that are way beyond the kinds of prices that are taken for granted in many other developed countries around the world, particularly in northern America and Europe.

Elsewhere, in many countries now, broadband is a service that is broadly like the telephone or electricity. It is effectively universally available, it is relatively inexpensive and it is taken for granted as being a standard service that governments either provide or ensure is provided. And it is provided at serious speeds and at modest and falling prices. The rest of the developed world is on the information superhighway; we are still cranking up the old T-model Ford on the goat track. We are still cranking it up in the kilobits lane, trying to get some degree of connection that at least gives people some links to the wider outside world.

Over 11 years and more the Howard government has had one idea in telecommunications. As in Yes, Minister, the government is like the minister with one idea. Guess what that idea was? It was: sell Telstra. That is the one idea the conservatives have had. All they have managed to do with respect to broadband over that time is roll out endless pork-barrel programs and endless mountains of taxpayers’ money that in many cases are just fuelling marginal seat campaigns and not delivering serious broadband for the Australian consumer and the Australian business.

Broadband Connect is the latest version of that and we have now got large numbers of regional businesses complaining that they have had the plug pulled from underneath them in that program. We have had the Auditor-General analyse the infamous Networking the Nation program—hundreds of millions of dollars. The conclusion? We cannot say whether any public benefit has been delivered because there were no benchmarks, no targets and no capacity to determine whether this was to the benefit of the public.

We are now left in the situation where we have broadband gridlock in this country. Because of the obsession with selling Telstra, the government has ended up with a gridlock. Telstra refuses to invest unless the government gives it a regulatory regime which entrenches its monopoly power, and the government is unable to move on either front. The end result is gridlock; the end result is that many Australians simply cannot get broadband services.

On a very generous benchmark, Australia is 17th in the developed world in access to broadband and 25th in the developed world in internet bandwidth. The Prime Minister claimed today that we have the second fastest rate of take-up at the moment. He very carefully avoided saying where we are on the ladder of internet bandwidth or broadband access. We have a fast rate of take-up because we are coming from a very low base and because the measure he is using is so generous—it is a kilobits measure—that it is easy for us to look good. The reality of course is very different.

This matters a lot. It matters in the big picture sense for the future of Australia and our economy and it matters in the small picture sense for individual small businesses and for Australian families. Our performance in productivity in this country in recent years has been very ordinary. Our productivity relative to that of the United States reached a peak of about 86 per cent in the late 1990s, largely on the back of the reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments. We have slipped back from 86 per cent to 79 per cent. Serious commentators like the ANZ Bank senior economist Saul Eslake suspect that a significant component of that deterioration is due to the lack of broadband. Typically, American businesses, large and small, have much better access to much higher speed broadband than Australia. The gap in productivity between us and the United States is widening because of our inferior broadband access.

Broadband is the road and rail system of the 21st century. It is crucial not just to businesses that are in the high-tech world, the computer world or the internet; it is crucial to all businesses. It is becoming a standard tool of business activity like the telephone and the typewriter. It is crucial to all kinds of businesses. I found this out some years ago when I visited, of all things, a small gourmet sausage factory in Perth that was threatened with going out of business because it could not get broadband and deal electronically with its customers on the eastern seaboard. That was a serious threat to its existence. I have been in small country towns in Northern Tasmania meeting with small businesses like optometrists, auto-electricians and real estate agents—hardly right in the high-tech zone—who are all complaining about the lack of broadband access in their community.

Recently I was in the electorate of Bowman and encountered the fact that small businesses in an industrial park were refused broadband access by Telstra and were told that the exchange was full—‘Sorry, no more broadband. Can’t get it.’ They had to wind up a political campaign with their local state MP and their Labor candidate for Bowman, Jason Young, in order to get Telstra to back down. That, in this day and age, is the equivalent of businesses having to run a small political campaign in their local area to get the electricity put on. It is absolutely ludicrous, but that is the situation that prevails in Australia today.

This is also of crucial importance to our children and to the future of our education system. When my oldest daughter is with me every second weekend she is doing homework from her government school and it is assumed that she will have access to the internet to do that homework. Almost by definition, the question of how fast speeds are is of fundamental importance to her ability to do that. These things are now widespread, uniform and universal requirements, and yet we are still stuck cranking up the old T-model Ford on the goat track.

That is why Labor are going to act. We are going to build for Australia’s future. We are going to invest up to $4.7 billion that is held in existing telecommunications investments. What we are proposing to do is to take two existing telecommunications investments owned by the Commonwealth in the Communications Fund and some of the shares in Telstra. We are going to dedicate that to investing in building a new network with speeds of a minimum of 12 megabits per second, much higher in many cases, and with coverage of 98 per cent of the Australian population in a rollout that occurs within five years. We will do this through a partnership with the private sector on a broadly fifty-fifty basis to insert the commercial disciplines, the market disciplines, to be allied with the wider public interest and to give open access to all telecommunications service providers to ensure genuine competition. This will provide the genuine productivity jolt that the Australian economy requires. It will give small businesses access to the 21st century tools for doing business and it will bring Australia into the modern telecommunications era.

Part of this decision on behalf of our party involves making a hard choice, a hard decision, to accept defeat on the question of Telstra public ownership. That for me—as with many people in the Labor Party who have campaigned long and hard, unlike the gutless wimps in the National Party, to keep Telstra in public ownership—is a hard choice. I do not back away from that. It is something that is a very difficult thing for us to do but we are committed to the future. We are committed to building for the future, not trying to refight the battles of the past. We have fought that battle; we have lost. Telstra is now only 17 per cent publicly owned and there is every chance that by the time of the election it will be substantially less publicly owned than it is now.

Rather than moving those shares over after November 2008 and removing the ban on the Future Fund selling down, rather than having those shares moved over to passive investments in Coles, Woolworths, Qantas or BHP, we are going to have them in an active investment. This will deliver high-speed broadband accessible and available to virtually all Australians to build the economy for the future and to deliver more economic growth, higher productivity and higher tax revenue to sustain us into the future. These are all things that are critical to the interests of our children and the long-term interests of the nation.

We do not support public ownership of Telstra out of theology. We supported public ownership of Telstra for two key reasons. The first was to ensure that we did not have Telstra’s monopoly power—it is still nearly two-thirds of the entire sector and has controlled until now the dominant infrastructure—in private hands. The second was to support public ownership of Telstra to ensure that services in regional Australia were maintained, that there was a good, decent standard of service in the bush, to enable all Australians to get basic telecommunications services of a high standard. They are crucial issues for us but the key thing to understand is that with this proposal to build a new network, the resolution of those issues increasingly is going to be within this new network, not within ownership of Telstra.

We pursue the issues; we pursue the merits of the case, the objectives of the Labor Party, and where they take us now is that—having lost the debate, lost the fight about public ownership of Telstra—we are committed to ensuring that we are going to invest these public resources to deliver on these issues for people in the future. So some of the remaining Telstra shares will be invested in a joint venture to create a new network that will shift the Australian economy into the 21st century.

The government claimed in question time today and at other times that we are raiding the Future Fund, the bear in the honey pot—all of the florid rhetoric of the B-grade actor otherwise known as the Treasurer, tripping over his own rhetoric. Apparently, this is now the most economically irresponsible position the Labor Party have taken. It seems that Work Choices is no longer a big issue for the government and our opposition to Work Choices has now moved into second place. The proposal to take a pretty small proportion of shares that we said should never be in the Future Fund and that we always opposed being there to finance the building of a broadband network for the future of this country apparently is now the most economically irresponsible thing, according to the government, that Labor have ever stood for.

The true story is that we never supported the sale of Telstra and we never supported those shares going into the Future Fund. The government has a provision in its own legislation which enables it to deal with these shares in a separate way from the way that it is required to manage the rest of the Future Fund. The rest of the Future Fund supposedly is at arm’s length; the fund makes the decisions about how to invest, when to sell and what to buy. But in the case of Telstra shares there is a specific clause in the legislation that is designed to give the government the power to do literally whatever it likes, including to direct the fund to deal with those shares in a non-commercial way. If the government reckons that what we are doing is wrong, why did it insert that provision in the legislation? Why did it do that? If it is serious about protecting Telstra shares held in the Future Fund from political interference, as it describes it, why did it put that provision there?

There is no question that Labor making the call that the battle about public ownership of Telstra is over is a hard decision for us. We are committed to making the hard decisions that are necessary for this country’s future. Where that requires us to move on from a battle that we have fought and lost, so be it, because the future of this country, our economy and our children is now going to be very substantially influenced by our ability to provide the 21st century telecommunications network that will enable all businesses, large and small, to compete on equal terms with the rest of the world and enable our children to get the kind of education that they need and deserve.

The Prime Minister and the Howard government have run their race. They represent the past; they represent amongst other things an enduring legacy of incompetence and neglect when it comes to broadband and telecommunications infrastructure and services in this country. The Prime Minister just does not get it. He is still adapting to the crystal set. He is still recovering from the introduction of the mobile phone and the fax machine and he really has not discovered email, so he has no idea what broadband really means, how crucial it is to the productivity of Australian small businesses, to the education opportunities of Australian children and to Australian families. They are fiddling; they are neglecting the future of our country. We will invest because they have run their race. (Time expired)

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is an enormously important matters of public importance debate. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the government’s policies and any alternatives that the opposition might proffer as to broadband services throughout Australia. The common ground for all members of this parliament is that there is a need for equitable access to broadband infrastructure across Australia and that it is critical to Australia’s economic, social and cultural prosperity. But there the commonality of interests ends, because it is the allegation, or charge, of the opposition that—if I may paraphrase it for them—firstly, the government has neglected the rollout of broadband and, secondly, the opposition’s proposal would overcome that problem and correct that failing. On both contentions the government fiercely disagrees.

I am glad the opposition is coming to the issue of broadband. The simple fact is the government has been onto it for many years, so much so that we have already spent close to a billion dollars on Broadband Connect and extensions and rollouts. The government is making a targeted investment where it is most needed, through the $1.1 billion Connect Australia package. As part of the Connect Australia package, the government will shortly announce the winning bidders for up-front funding of $600 million to build new large-scale broadband infrastructure in regional areas. So our policies and our funding are continuing on, and while it would be mean spirited of me to suggest that opposition members are Johnny-come-latelys, others who are more objective and distant from the debate may well characterise them as that. Nonetheless, I welcome their conversion to the importance of broadband and welcome the fact that they have finally brought the matter, after the coalition’s some 11 years in government, into the parliamentary debating chamber.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Albanese interjecting

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Melbourne was heard in silence and so will the minister.

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On top of that massive investment in broadband, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Coonan, recently announced a further $162½ million for the Australian Broadband Guarantee, a guarantee that every Australian can access an affordable broadband service regardless of where they live. The government will also invest for their future through the $2 billion Communications Fund, with a substantial income stream coming online from the fund by mid-2008. The government will continue to provide leadership with regard to shaping Australia’s broadband future. It will foster investment confidence through a stable yet responsive regulatory environment, through targeted investment to areas of market failure and by ensuring there are incentives to invest in next generation broadband infrastructure.

We have a comprehensive, integrated and targeted policy and approach to broadband—and it is working. It is working extremely well. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in September last year Australia had 3.9 million broadband subscribers. Around a third of all Australian homes have broadband. The residential take-up of broadband increased by 63 per cent in regional areas and by 41 per cent in metropolitan areas in the year to September 2006. A major factor in broadband take-up is price. Australia is internationally competitive on broadband pricing. A 2006 United Kingdom report ranked Australian residential broadband plans as cheaper than those of South Korea and the United States—often held up as world benchmarks with regard to, firstly, the availability of broadband and, secondly, its affordability.

Speed is essential to broadband if it is to achieve our hopes and ambitions for it. Almost 90 per cent of Australian households are connected to exchanges providing speeds of between two megabits per second and eight megabits per second, which provides bandwidth to download movies, conduct videoconferencing, play games, teleconference and undertake everyday internet and email use. Nearly 50 per cent of the population can access even higher speeds of between 12 and 20 megabits per second from ADSL2+ broadband pay TV cable networks. Fixed wireless networks provide speeds of up to two megabits per second to almost 6½ million premises in Australia, including around 800,000 that cannot access ADSL broadband. There are now four third-generation mobile phone networks operating in Australia, all of which offer broadband services. Since March 2005 the number of broadband subscribers on 1½ megabits per second speed connections or greater has doubled, to 1.1 million. Small businesses, which we heard something about in question time, are taking advantage of the faster speeds. Almost one in five online small businesses use connections of two megabits per second or greater.

So the government’s investment is paying off, and it has been especially targeted to the regional, remote and isolated parts of Australia. This is not a government, let alone a government policy, only for urban Australia, unlike the Labor Party’s newly announced proposal—I will not dignify or glorify it with the title of ‘policy’—which is substantially lacking in a number of areas. But we will have time in the very near future to carefully—and constructively, I hasten to add—examine this piece of paper that has been launched with some aplomb today.

We have invested in providing subsidised broadband to regional areas since 2005. There is especially, as I have mentioned, that $162½ million to support the Australian Broadband Guarantee, which is the latest instalment. That guarantee will fill in the remaining black spots in metropolitan, outer metropolitan and regional and remote Australia—in fact wherever these black spots occur. If required, further funding will flow from investment of the government’s $2 billion infrastructure fund. The next stage of the broadband story in Australia is to provide scaleable and sustainable next-generation investment in rural and regional Australia. That is why the $600 million is available to allow the rollout of a new open access network.

Let us turn our mind to the prompt for today’s debate on broadband, the release of a Labor Party paper on broadband. This paper has a couple of faults. Firstly, there is its funding, in that $2.7 billion towards the cost of this government owned broadband network will come from the Future Fund—set aside by the coalition government for future generations, given our ageing population. Interestingly, the Labor Party will now sell the remaining Telstra shares. They are now going to accept the privatisation of Telstra. On every other government reform—in every aspect of fiscal discipline and of course in relation to industrial relations and tax reform—the Labor Party have opposed us. They always oppose us on every aspect. Everything we have ever put up in 11 years they have opposed but as soon as it has passed through the parliament they have adopted it, despite their opposition, and—more than that—promoted it as part of their economic management proposals or strategies for the future.

Honestly, I do not know how some of them can look at themselves in the mirror. For instance, as recently as 20 November last year, a bit over three months ago, the member for Melbourne, who led this debate and has supported the latest proposal for broadband from the Labor Party, said:

A Beazley Labor Government will not sell any more Government-owned Telstra shares, retaining the current stake in the company and providing certainty to shareholders.

Oh my heavens! Only three months ago he was again ruling out the selling of any more Telstra shares. He now performs the ultimate backflip, saying in the parliament just now that it is with a heavy heart that he does this but that it is economically responsible to do it. It was economically responsible to do it all those months ago when you opposed us in the lower and upper houses of this parliament—and now, of course, it is in their political interest to support the privatisation of Telstra. But I will tell you one thing: this will not come as a surprise to the Australian people. They have always believed—with the Labor Party’s record on the privatisation of Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, CSL, insurance companies and anything else that was not nailed down—that they would eventually privatise Telstra.

Indeed, our own polling shows this. I will let you in on a little secret now that you have agreed to the full privatisation of Telstra. We have gone to every election—1998, 2001 and 2004—with the policy of the privatisation of Telstra even though, generally speaking, it was not popular, particularly in the areas that I and my colleagues in the National Party represent. But we stood our ground, argued the merits of it and explained it—and, for our support of the privatisation, we extracted a great deal for regional and rural Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure. But, despite Labor Party opposition to the privatisation of Telstra by the coalition, people always believed it would do the same on coming to office. And it was not a vote switcher, it was not a vote loser, because people always knew the Labor Party would eventually reveal its true colours as a privatiser par excellence, particularly having regard to its history.

So, within six months of the forthcoming election, the Labor Party have announced not only will they accept the privatisation of Telstra but also they would hasten the sale of the remaining shares held by the Future Fund—raid the Future Fund—to get their hands on the money. Nothing could be calculated to be more irresponsible or more of a betrayal of the interests of Australia and Australians now and into the future than to diminish the Future Fund. It was set aside and is growing to provide for the unfunded liabilities and future commitments of an ageing population when the taxpayer base simply will not be able to meet the health, welfare and social requirements of an aged population. The Labor Party are going to have to explain to Australians why, for short-term political gain, they are jeopardising the long-term future of all Australians.

On top of raiding the Future Fund of $2.7 billion, the Labor Party is going to abolish the $2 billion Regional Telecommunications Fund which has been set aside to make sure the most disadvantaged Australians can get reliable services in the future. By abolishing the telecommunications fund the Labor Party is signalling unambiguously and very strongly that it is going to fund broadband to a certain extent in metropolitan Australia. It is not going to use the telecommunications fund to target areas of need in regional and remote Australia. The Labor Party is abandoning regional Australia for urban Australia. Abolishing the $2 billion telecommunications fund, which was specifically established to support the infrastructure needs of rural Australia, is a complete sell-out. There can be no claim by the Labor Party of any interest in, let alone representation of, rural and regional Australia if it is going to abolish the $2 billion telecommunications fund.

This paper by the Labor Party, far from being a policy, has a number of other defects. Why would I, the representative in the lower house of the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, know this so quickly? Because I have seen this paper before, in large part. It was released by the member for Brand, in his role as the Leader of the Opposition, only two years ago. It was conceded by Senator Conroy in his Press Club address today that it is in large part copied—or plagiarised, if the member for Brand wants to retain the intellectual property rights for it. It was announced two years ago and no-one took it seriously then. It got next to no coverage publicly and it did not excite any interest from the private sector. Within days of its announcement, Telstra disowned it and said they would not participate, and everybody else in the industry said it was not an achievable plan.

So Labor’s solution is to rehash an established paper, throw money at it—money drawn from the Future Fund, with all the social and economic issues surrounding that—and abolish the telecommunications fund, which abandons country people. Labor’s proposal is not going to go anywhere, and it certainly will not go anywhere near regional and remote Australia. Labor cannot be trusted with the needs of regional and remote Australia, they cannot be trusted with this country’s telecommunications infrastructure and they cannot be trusted with Australia’s economy.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government is out of ideas, out of touch and out of time. Here again today we have the Labor Party setting the policy agenda—an agenda to secure our prosperity beyond the mining boom, an agenda looking forward to the future—against a government that is simply stuck in the past. To secure Australia’s long-term prosperity we must boost our productivity and international competitiveness. We need to implement policies for the long-term national interest, and part of that has to be investment in nation-building infrastructure, because Labor believes that Australia’s future productivity, competitiveness and wealth creation relies on world-class infrastructure.

We know that spending on infrastructure is an investment; it is not a cost. Today we have had a very significant policy announcement: that Labor would build a new national broadband network in partnership with the private sector that would deliver a minimum speed of 12 megabits per second for 98 per cent of Australians—over 40 times faster than most current internet speeds—and that we would ensure that the remaining two per cent of Australians, in regional and remote areas, have improved services. We have undertaken to have a competitive assessment of proposals to roll out an open access fibre-to-the-node broadband network and put in place regulatory reforms to facilitate that rollout. And we will use existing government investments in communications to provide a public equity investment in a joint equity venture of up to $4.7 billion in the new broadband network. This would include drawing on the $2 billion Communications Fund and the Future Fund’s 17 per cent share in Telstra.

The government essentially had two criticisms of the proposals in question time, and there were more from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who was put up as the spokesperson in this debate. The first criticism, from the Prime Minister, essentially exposed the government’s position when it comes to infrastructure and investment. The Prime Minister saw spending on broadband infrastructure as consumption. Labor sees it as investment, a $4.7 billion investment in our future. The second criticism, which came primarily from the Treasurer, was that somehow we were raiding the Future Fund. Well, if the future is not about broadband, what is it about? Broadband is essential for our future.

A third criticism, which came from the agriculture minister, was that somehow Labor is now supporting the privatisation of Telstra. Let us be very clear about what has happened here. Because the National Party refused to stand up over the privatisation of Telstra, which was opposed at each and every turn by the Australian Labor Party, the privatisation has gone through. It is a reality. But we are determined to ensure that those funds are used in the interests of building the future of our telecommunications, setting up this joint equity venture that will make sure that services are delivered and that Australia moves forward into this century.

We are in a crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks Australia 25th in the world for available internet bandwidth. Rupert Murdoch has said this about Australia’s broadband infrastructure:

I think it is a disgrace. I think we should be spending—the Government with Telstra should be spending—$10 billion or $12 billion on it (so it gets to) every town in Australia.

James Packer has described it as ‘embarrassing’. David Kirk has described it as ‘fraudband’. But the Prime Minister simply cannot see it, because for 11 years the Howard government has treated Australia’s communications infrastructure as a short-term political issue, not a long-term policy investment. In recent years, we have seen a number of announcements by the Howard government. We had the Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities in 2002, the Higher Bandwidth Incentive Scheme in 2003, the National Broadband Strategy in 2004, the National Broadband Strategy Implementation Group in 2004—program after program announced by the government. But still we are falling behind the world. We are giving the world a competitive advantage against us that we simply cannot afford, particularly due to our geographical location.

One of the great things about the development of telecommunications infrastructure is that it has an ability to override that geographical disadvantage that Australia has suffered from in the past so that we can take advantage of the fact that here we have a number of natural advantages, due to our environment and due to our people, most of all. The government simply fail to see that. Let us have a look at what happens when they do establish programs. During the 2004 federal election they announced the metropolitan broadband black spots program, a $50 million bandaid designed to give the impression of government policy action. There is always some announcement at election time, but have a look at what has happened. At Senate estimates we exposed the fact that the program had disbursed only $200,000. Put this in perspective: for a $50 million program, only $200,000 has actually been spent. And it cost $1.4 million to administer. They spend more on the bureaucrats—seven times more—than on delivering the broadband infrastructure. I asked the Prime Minister about this in question time. Remember what he said: ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ We’re waiting, Prime Minister. They know that that is the case and they do not have answers.

The minister for agriculture also said, ‘They’re going to spend the Communications Fund.’ Let us have a look at what National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce had to say about this $2 billion Communications Fund. He said he was ‘happy’ to have it described as ‘a slush fund’. That is what it is. We will actually put that fund to proper use.

Broadband is not just faster internet or toys for IT geeks; broadband is an enabling infrastructure. It enables productivity gains, creates new markets, fosters new businesses and creates new jobs. The federal government’s own Broadband Advisory Group found:

… next generation broadband could produce economic benefits of $12-30 billion per annum to Australia.

So we know that it is absolutely necessary. A statewide broadband network in New South Wales would boost the state’s economy by $1.4 billion a year, increase employment by thousands of jobs after 10 years and raise exports by $400 million over its first decade. Broadband impacts on everyday lives: the ability of young people to get a proper education, the ability of small businesses to operate and compete with big business, the ability to deliver health and essential services and the ability to communicate at home and with the world.

It is not surprising that they are behind the game on this because, when it comes to infrastructure across the board, the Business Council of Australia has identified a $90 billion shortfall in infrastructure—not just communications but in our ports, in our energy infrastructure, in our roads and rail systems, and in our water infrastructure. Yet public investment in national infrastructure is falling. Public investment decreased from 2.5 per cent to 1.8 per cent of GDP between June 1987 and June 2006. In 2004 Australia ranked 20th out of 25 OECD countries in investment in public infrastructure as a proportion of GDP. The government is incapable of stepping into the future and governing for the needs of this century. Labor is showing today once again that we are up to the task, that we are setting the agenda and that we are prepared to take on these issues. It is time that this government got out of the way. (Time expired)

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to speak on this MPI today, because the availability of broadband and speed of the service is something I have taken a keen interest in in my electorate of Stirling. When I was elected there were some broadband black spots. They were isolated and they seemed to occur at random intervals. But after several visits by the minister for communications, who came and directly discussed the problem with constituents in Stirling, and due to the Howard government’s commitment to providing broadband services, I am very pleased to report to the House that those black spots are being eradicated.

This is really what surprises me about this motion today. The Howard government has already made a firm commitment to provide all Australians—that is, all Australians regardless of where they live—with access to broadband services. I think that bears repeating: the government has committed that all Australians, regardless of where they live, will have access to broadband services. This includes the remotest parts of the nation and it includes isolated areas that obviously pose particular challenges when it comes to providing telecommunications infrastructure. This commitment has been backed already by the $1 billion worth of expenditure. Indeed, on 7 March, a mere two weeks ago, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts announced a further $162½ million for the Australian Broadband Guarantee. This is on top of the $878 million Broadband Connect program and the $50 million Metro Broadband Connect program.

The government’s performance on broadband take-up rates and speed is already extremely strong. Australia has over 3.9 million broadband subscribers and around one-third of all Australian homes have broadband. Australia is above the OECD average when it comes to broadband take-up. Indeed, we are ranked 17th for overall take-up. If you have a look at where some of the comparable countries in the OECD are ranked, Germany is 18th, France is 16th, the UK is 10th and the US is 12th. But Australia’s take-up rate for broadband grew at a faster rate than any OECD country except Denmark in the 12 months to 30 June last year. Residential take-up of broadband increased by 63 per cent in regional areas and 41 per cent in metropolitan areas in the year to September 2006. A major factor driving this take-up is price. Australia has very internationally competitive broadband pricing. In 2006, a UK report ranked Australia’s residential broadband plans as cheaper than those of South Korea and the United States.

I want to turn to speeds, because we have heard a lot about relative broadband speeds in the debate today. I would like to inform the House that almost 90 per cent of Australian households are connected to exchanges that provide speeds of between two megabits per second and eight megabits per second, which is more than enough bandwidth to download movies, conduct videoconferencing, play online games and teleconference. Of course, it is more than enough for everyday internet and email use. Nearly 50 per cent of the population can access even higher speeds of between 12 to 20 megabits per second from ADSL2 broadband and from pay TV cable networks. And yet the Labor Party has announced their grand plan today to provide speeds of 12 megabits per second broadband! Fifty per cent of the Australian population can already access speeds that are equal to or higher than that.

Fixed wireless networks in Australia provide speeds of up to two megabits per second to almost 6.5 million premises in Australia, including around 800,000 that cannot access ADSL broadband. There are now four third-generation mobile phone networks operating in Australia, all of which offer broadband services. Since March 2007 the number of broadband subscribers on 1.5-megabit speed connections or greater has doubled to 1.1 million. Small businesses are taking advantage of the faster speeds. Almost one in five online small businesses use connections of two megabits or greater.

Australia is different from some of our competitors in the fact that we operate in a unique environment of having a huge continental landmass which is sparsely populated. But when South Korea, a country that would fit into Australia many times over, decided that they needed to build the equivalent fibre-to-the-node network that Labor is talking about today it cost them $US40 billion. Yet the Labor government has today announced a plan that they say will cost only $A4.7 billion. The government has already shown unique ingenuity in dealing with new technologies as they arrive in Australia and adapting them to our very difficult requirements. Of course, it is vitally important that this happens, because we have a $1 trillion economy and we fully recognise that broadband is going to be an important part of productivity growth in the future.

Broadband is indeed going to play an important role in securing our economic future. That is why the minister announced a broadband blueprint in December last year. This blueprint provides a national framework for the future of broadband in Australia, and it comes at a reasonable cost in conjunction with private sector investment. By contrast, let us look at Labor’s plan. They plan to raid the future. They plan to steal from future generations to fund what may well be obsolete technology in the future. We need to remember that Labor’s policy two years ago was to spend $5 billion building a dial-up network. This is the point: the private sector is best placed to adapt to new technologies and is best placed to roll out these new technologies as they evolve. What the government should do is provide the appropriate framework and support where necessary for that to happen.

Labor announced its plan today—this so-called fibre-to-the-node network. They believe it will cover 98 per cent of Australia. It is not a real plan, because we have yet to see any detail. There is absolutely no detail on how this network will be rolled out to 98 per cent of the Australian population. We have no idea what level of private investment will be involved, what regulatory arrangements are being contemplated, whether there will be appropriate access arrangements or how this public-private partnership might work. These are just some of the questions that have not been answered. The plan provides no idea how Telstra’s cooperation will be obtained or how any other competing carrier will be able to submit a viable fibre-to-the-node proposal. It begs the question: will a Labor government use heavy-handed legislation to compulsorily acquire parts of the Telstra network that they believe might be essential for establishing this fibre-to-the-node network?

Labor has fixed on fibre to the node as the only way of delivering high-speed broadband to all areas of Australia. But, of course, and as I know from my own experience in Stirling, there are many other technologies such as high-speed wireless networks, which may provide more efficient or viable services. The best example of this is to refer back to Labor’s policy of two years ago when they proposed to spend $5 billion to build a dial-up network that we all know now is completely obsolete technology. Labor have not given any consideration to the effect of its proposal on existing broadband providers in regional Australia or on the broadband infrastructure to be rolled out as part of the government’s Broadband Connect program. We know what Labor are really going to do: they will rob the bush to provide a level of service in the city that people outside of the metropolitan areas will not be able to get access to. This confirms Labor’s legendary contempt for rural Australia.

Before I close, I would like to turn to the funding policies that Labor have for this network. Last year, the Howard government achieved the historic full privatisation of Telstra after a decade of making the arguments publicly about the benefits that a full sale would provide for Australian consumers. After we went out and made the arguments, and Labor opposed us at every turn, in a very short space of time Labor have managed to come up with plans to spend that money. The sale of Telstra along with strong budget surpluses have allowed us to eliminate the $96 billion of debt that we inherited from Labor and to create a super fund to provide for the government’s superannuation liabilities. Labor plans to totally destroy that good work. As a younger member of this House, I find it offensive that the coalition have worked hard to provision for outstanding liabilities that will accumulate with Australia’s ageing population, yet Labor want to cavalierly raid this money to provide for their political— (Time expired)

Graham Edwards (Cowan, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary (Defence and Veterans' Affairs)) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is laughable to listen to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, government ministers and other government speakers stand up in this place and complain about ALP policy being about getting into the Future Fund. We just heard the input from the member opposite, who used the words ‘steal from future generations’. What a lot of absolute nonsense. I say that because we know that this government, and we have seen it over the last decade, has consistently spent money on securing its own short-term political future at the expense of long-term investment in infrastructure and long-term investment in the future of this nation.

For this government to turn around and say today that we are selling out on future generations is an absolute joke. You will only secure the future for future generations if you start spending on infrastructure today. This government have consistently thrown away opportunity—10 years of opportunity—on short-term political fixes geared to secure their own political future at the expense of Australia and young Australians. And we get this hypocrite of a Prime Minister come into this House and try to lecture the Australian Labor Party on securing the future of this nation. We are seeing a tired old Prime Minister. That is becoming increasingly evident, not just from what people are saying out in the community; you only have to look at the backbench during question time to see that they are scared. That is one of the reasons why right from the word go today they have been trying to scuttle Kevin Rudd’s view for the future, a view that we have to have if we are going to secure the future for younger generations and for the young kids of our nation.

I have spoken on the issue of Telstra and its lack of services for some time. I campaigned on it in 1998. We have campaigned on it ever since. For the minister to recently have said in public that no-one is complaining about broadband speeds in metropolitan Australia is a clear reflection of just how out of touch with reality and how arrogant this government has become. We know that what this government has been about in recent years is simply squandering money in the bush, trying to placate the Nationals and trying to look after their political interests—and it has been at the expense of Australia.

When I spoke in 2005 on the matter of public importance regarding another partial sale of Telstra that the government had gone into, I said:

The proceeds of the partial sale have been squandered. They have been squandered on buying votes in the bush and through the bulbous pockets of the government’s spendthrifts, who have wasted countless opportunities for proper and prudent investment in our infrastructure, our services and our future. The proceeds have been squandered by the biggest pork-barrelling government in the history of Australia—squandered and wasted, not invested. The government has not invested in infrastructure, in growth, in their loyal clientele, in the future of our nation ... or ... in Telstra.

Is it any wonder that the greatest number of complaints we get in my northern suburbs office are about broadbanding issues? Is it any wonder that ordinary small business people—mums and dads—are complaining that this government has let the people of Australia down consistently over 10 years? Is it any wonder now that they are not going to accept the word of this tired old Prime Minister who accuses us of stealing from the future? The Rudd Labor opposition is about investing in the future, investing in infrastructure, investing in our young people and securing their future. (Time expired)

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Broadband is a key component of our national infrastructure. We need it essentially as we need roads and railways, ports and airports. The government has invested in providing subsidised broadband to regional areas since 2005 and has just announced a further $162 million for the Australian Broadband Guarantee which will fill the remaining black spots. If necessary, further funding to patch these black spots will come from investment of the government’s $2 billion infrastructure fund, which in round figures should give at least $120 million a year on an ongoing basis. That is what makes Labor’s plan to eliminate that fund so heinous.

The next step in rolling out better broadband is the promotion of next generation investment in rural and regional areas, which is why we have put on the table $600 million to establish an open access network. An open access network implies competition, and competition is essential because better broadband is of no use to people if they cannot afford it. We have heard a lot today about Korea and the United States. Their broadband is a lot dearer than ours will be, which is why a combination of competition, strategic government support and strict regulation is the key to delivering this technology.

The government is already getting on with the job. Since 2004, $878 million has been spent on  Broadband Connect and approximately $109 million has been spent on HiBIS. This has resulted in more than 200,000 new consumers in regional areas being connected to broadband, more than a million extra premises having access to metro-comparable broadband services and an extra 1,500 exchanges being ADSL enabled. To underscore the government’s achievement, the President of the National Farmers Federation, David Crombie, late last year had this to say:

As part of the government’s broadband connect initiative focused on under-served areas this $600 million component has the capacity to significantly improve the services, and enhance the availability, of efficient and timely broadband outcomes for rural Australia.

The minister will shortly announce the successful bidder or bidders for up-front funding from the $600 million program to help build new large-scale broadband infrastructure which will deliver competitive wholesale prices in regional areas into the future.

So let us look at the Labor policy, which is really just a rehash of the one Kim Beazley cooked up around two years ago. To get to that, Labor will abolish the $2 billion Communication Fund which, as I said, is capable of giving us about $120 million a year into the future and which exists to make sure the most disadvantaged Australians have access to decent telecommunications services into the future. The new Labor policy will be ‘Bush be damned!’ They will spend the Communication Fund plus—wait for it—$2.7 billion of the Future Fund on broadband for the cities and forget about the backbone of the national economy: our hardworking farmers, businesspeople, miners and others who live outside the metropolitan areas.

I would like to know how Labor’s fibre-to-the-node network is going to reach 98 per cent of Australians and still deliver competition. It is interesting, too, that they picked 98 per cent. I went to the briefing on the coalition’s current programs, and at the end of the $600 million program, which will be rolled out in the near future, we will be at 98 per cent. So where is the wizardry here?

The other interesting thing is that just two years ago Labor wanted us to pay $5 billion for dial-up internet. That is how far up with the technology they were. There was forward-thinking policy of great rigour—I don’t think! If $5 billion is the magic figure and they are going to have $4.7 billion to do what they want to do, there is a very strong inference in the scenario that Labor is putting to us that they are going to put the whole thing into the capital cities.

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for this discussion has now expired.