Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection and return to it, Senator Nash. Unfortunately, in the race between nations to establish the business conditions necessary to compete in the global economy, our international peers are investing heavily in cutting-edge communications infrastructure. China gets it; India gets it; we do not get it. We keep lagging; they get further ahead—and they have already got plenty of other advantages over us. In contrast, we have not even got to the starting line.

But apparently this is not of concern to the Howard government. The refrain of the minister for communications over the past two years has been that there is no need for further investment in broadband infrastructure in Australia. Senator Birmingham, I am looking forward to your inaugural speech, because I know that one of the issues in your home town of Adelaide is broadband. But Senator Coonan went on to say, ‘No-one is complaining about broadband speeds.’ She must not have been to Adelaide very often, Senator Birmingham. You should invite her to come to the place. The minister has fought a ferocious fight in favour of the status quo, a status quo in which Australia continues to trail the world in this important area of economic infrastructure. The Prime Minister apparently has a similar view, telling parliament this week: ‘It is not the business of taxpayers to fund broadband. It should be a product of the proper operations of the market circumstances of our economy.’ And Senator Nash is parroting that. My message to the Prime Minister is that we are still waiting. After 18 months of private sector debate with the ACCC and the government, there has been no movement. If, as the Prime Minister suggests, the federal government plays no role in facilitating infrastructure investment, how long will we be waiting before true broadband infrastructure is rolled out in Australia? How long do we have to wait? If the government vacates the field and shows no leadership on this issue, how long will it be until we see the kind of major infrastructure investments the Australian economy needs?

In reality, the Howard government knows that it does have a responsibility to invest in broadband infrastructure in Australia. And, Senator Nash, you can claim some credit for what I am about to talk about. Despite you saying just a moment ago that the government should not spend any money on it, since 2002 the Howard government has spent literally billions of taxpayers’ dollars on 16 separate broadband programs. The government stands up and says, ‘The taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for this.’ Why have you got 16 separate programs? The minister proudly boasted recently, ‘We’ve spent $4 billion on broadband.’ The government’s own minister says, ‘We’ve spent $4 billion on these 16 programs, but taxpayers should not be involved.’ I just wish Senator Coonan would occasionally have a chat with the Prime Minister or vice versa. Unfortunately, all we have to show for this spending is a series of press releases and, to their credit, National Party photo opportunities.

These programs were short-term, politically motivated bandaid solutions, but they did exist—putting a lie to the Prime Minister’s claim. The Prime Minister’s line that this is not the government’s responsibility is simply the Howard government’s latest excuse for its own lack of leadership in facilitating broadband investment in Australia. Presumably the reason that investment in broadband infrastructure was utterly ignored is that the minister believes she will be able to fix this issue with a behind closed doors, election-year deal with Telstra. In fact, Senator Coonan insisted:

… 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, within three years—

and that the provider ‘probably will be Telstra’. This claim came as a surprise to many in the industry, given that Telstra’s plans for a FTTN network have lain dormant since July 2006, due to the regulatory gridlock that had emerged under the minister’s watch. The minister herself told the Senate on 26 February this year that Telstra had ‘walked away’ from its FTTN proposal. It also came as a surprise when Telstra informed the ASX that it could not proceed with its FTTN investment, and Phil Burgess, Telstra’s head of regulatory policy, stated:

The Government needs to get its own policy house in order before there will be progress—

for all Australia on the FTTN talks. Mr Burgess was saying that government policy would have to change before Telstra would make its FTTN investment. But last year, before Labor announced its policy for a national broadband network, the minister did not agree with Mr Burgess. After the collapse of Telstra and the ACCC’s FTTN negotiations, the minister told the Senate, on 17 August 2006:

… if Telstra were actually concerned about this, they could have, if they wished, proceeded with their investment. My understanding is that they had committed to doing that and had engaged in conversations with the ACCC for months—and in fact had admitted that they were, to all intents and purposes, satisfied with the talks that had taken place with the regulator that would have enabled competitors to have access to fibre to the node.

So in August of last year, according to the minister, there was no regulatory impasse to the construction of a FTTN network. She built on that on 21 March this year, when she said:

The regulatory environment that is currently provided is sufficiently flexible to deal with the issues that have been brought to government both by Telstra and by the current G9 proposals.

Again, the minister said that no regulatory reform was needed. However, come April—and under pressure from the overwhelmingly positive public response to Labor’s plans—the minister was singing a very different tune, telling the Australian:

“It’s important that we work through and ensure the particularly regulatory concerns—

of Telstra—

are addressed.”

…            …            …

“I could and should take a role in making sure the regulatory concerns of proponents are addressed,” she said.

Further, despite stating just last year that, ‘The government will not be changing the USO; it was reviewed recently and will not be changed,’ the minister then said in a press release:

Telstra had no immediate plans for the network to extend to the remaining capital cities, large regional centres and rural areas …

This is the minister quoting the Telstra proposal. She went on to say:

Therefore, Telstra’s argument about the costs of providing a service to rural, regional and remote Australia is not relevant to FTTN.

The minister now says, in the Australian article, ‘You clearly need to look at what Telstra calls the rural deficit’ to facilitate the rollout of FTTN—an issue intrinsically linked with the USO. But last year she said there were no issues with metropolitan and rural and regional cross-subsidies; this year, under political pressure, ‘You clearly need to look at it.’

Let us be clear on this, because government ministers continue to engage in misleading the Australian public. They keep saying that there are two proposals for a fibre optics network. What they are not telling Australians is that the two networks only cover five capital cities and a couple of regional centres. It is not a national network. Telstra and Optus put up their hands and say, ‘We’ve got these proposals for these rollouts,’ but they are not national networks. Both of them make it absolutely clear: ‘We need government money. We have to come to an arrangement with the government.’