Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Coonan, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I refer the minister to her comments on ABC TV yesterday:

... prospects are reasonable that there will be an opportunity for a provider or a group of providers to ... roll out a fast fibre network very soon ...

and that ultimately the provider will probably be Telstra. Hasn’t Telstra clearly informed the Australian Stock Exchange that it will not be proceeding with a fibre rollout without regulatory reforms, which you have ruled out before 2009? Minister, doesn’t that make your claims that ‘prospects are reasonable’ a complete nonsense?