Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

We are currently providing more than $600 million in incentives to leverage investment by the private sector to build a new high-speed open access network across the country. Through the $2 billion Communications Fund, we are future-proofing the bush and ensuring its future telecommunications needs will be met.

Senator Nash asked me about alternative policies. Yesterday the Labor Party sought to unload one of the greatest policy con jobs on the Australian public, even more dubious than the infamous ‘noodle nation’, with a thinly detailed, poorly costed and essentially undeliverable proposal to lay fibre end-to-end across Australia. The policy to date has seen Australia’s foremost institutional analysts condemning Labor’s proposal as taking the country back 20 years and as being impractical. At the same time, other telecommunications specialists have labelled Mr Rudd’s first technological foray as overkill and redundant. As ABN AMRO concluded, ‘It really is broadband dreaming.’

No-one can deny that Australians have an appetite for broadband. As I have often said, we are second in the world in terms of OECD broadband take-up rates. But Mr Rudd’s Labor plan is quintessential Labor of old—leave out the detail, fudge the costings, throw out any semblance of prudent economic management. Out of yesterday’s 22-page document, which Senator Conroy admitted in his Press Club address had kept him up late for the previous 48 hours, only one page is devoted to any sort of detail on Labor’s proposal. I looked in vain for a coverage map or a costing table, and there is an abject omission of any level of technical detail. Already, yesterday’s mid-morning announcement of an $8 billion costing for Mr Rudd’s broadband stab in the dark is rising at the rate of about $1 billion every 12 hours. By late afternoon, Senator Conroy said in an interview with Steve Price on Sydney radio that Labor’s costings had already increased and were now about $8 billion to $9 billion.

But, even with those rising numbers, Labor’s upwardly revised figure is well short of what is realistically required to build a national fibre network capable of delivering a universal minimum speed of 12 megabits to 98 per cent of the population. But don’t take my word for it—less than a year ago Telstra was widely reported as saying that a national fibre rollout would cost in excess of $30 billion. That is about a $22 billion shortfall so far on Labor’s estimates. Two years ago, in evidence to Senate estimates, Telstra executive Bill Scales said in relation to the fibre rollout:

At the very least it requires literally tens of billions of dollars of investment.

Independent experts have said that it is about $20 billion. So while Telstra and independent analysts have proven Labor’s costings to be little more than a back-of-the-envelope stab in the dark, the most damning assessments come from proven international experience. In the case of Singapore, a country with a land mass half the size of Sydney, the fibre rollout cost was $5 billion. Does Labor really expect the public to swallow Labor’s claim that they can cover seven million additional square kilometres with fibre with only $3 billion more? (Time expired)