Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network) Bill 2008 provides for specified information to be provided by the telecommunications carriers to the Commonwealth so that it can be disclosed to companies considering bidding for the national broadband network, which is worth, as we all know, $4.7 billion in public funds. The Democrats are broadly supportive of the government’s proposal to roll out a high-speed fibre based broadband network over the next five years. It is certainly better than the Howard government’s proposal. But there are question marks over how this will work in delivering a competitive and cooperative telecommunications environment. Telstra, as we all know, has done its level best for many years now to thwart competition—in fact, certainly well before it was even privatised—and to resist regulation. If the government does not get this right, the country could be captive to monopolistic behaviour in an ongoing sense.

The history of telecommunications has been anything but cooperative and competitive. The mexican stand-off over the last 12 years between the last government and Telstra effectively delayed progress on high-speed broadband for at least two years. There has been enormous growth in the Australian market for broadband. Three and a half million or so households now use broadband and 80 per cent of businesses are connected. However, the price for high-speed broadband—that is, two megabits plus per second—is still too high to produce more rapid uptake of these services. Less than 25 per cent of Australians have connection speeds that are greater than one megabit per second. That of course compares very poorly with Europe, where most people are on services faster than three megabits per second—12 times faster than what most Australian users have access to.

Affordability is a more important factor than speed in the success or otherwise of broadband. According to Budde Communication, uptakes of between 60 and 80 per cent can only be reached with access prices of around $40 a month. Proposals that have been mooted so far have been much higher than that. So we do accept the need for government intervention and investment, and indeed this is what the Australian Democrats have been calling for for many years. We need fast internet access and email to provide e-health, tele-education, smart meters and the like, which have enormous scope for cost efficiency and better service delivery in this country. This investment in broadband should return to this country in terms of productivity.

But the government does need to get the policy right and make sure that this money is not wasted. As has already been said here, we are talking about an enormous amount of money—one of the biggest investment platforms in many, many years. We are supportive of course of the provisions of the bill. Competitive bids will be crucial to getting the best out of this $4½ billion and will depend on players other than Telstra getting access to the necessary information for full fibre-to-the-node network architecture.

I am pleased to say the government has taken on board at least some of the recommendations made by the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts, but I need to point out that it did not bother to distribute its amendments to us. So I will be looking forward to the minister’s explanation for them. I thank the opposition for briefing us on its amendments. So far I see no reason to not support them, but, as always, I will be listening to the debate.

The government’s panel of experts does not seem to me to be expert enough or broad enough for an exercise of this scale and importance. As always, there needs to be a strong focus on accountability with so much money involved.