Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an unfortunate day when we start moving towards the removal of the $2 billion that was set aside to look after regional Australia. That was something that we fought hard for, something the National Party fought tenaciously for over a long period of time. It was something that went backwards and forwards to Queensland. It was something that we initially said we would never support until we got what we were looking for. After an immense amount of negotiations we did get that—we got the $2 billion trust fund. But people should understand that the interest from that fund was to go towards the delivery of better telecommunications outcomes for regional Australia. I think about $480 million this year would have been available for the delivery of new mobile phone towers, new optic fibre and a whole range of different outcomes.

But that money has been taken away from regional Australia. That money has been stripped away from those on the margins and replaced by this ridiculous proposal by Labor. They are going to give a toolbox for the 21st century and computer access for every school—as long as they have broadband, and some regional areas do not have that. We are trying to get this program out to them, but they are taking away the mechanism for the actual delivery of the funds to do that. And to do what? It will become part of a bigger corpus of funds that, ultimately, will just supply broadband back to major metropolitan centres.

There is a very indeterminate time frame on what Labor are intending to do in the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network) Bill 2008. It is another one of their promises into the never-never. Despite what Senator Fielding from the one-member Family First Party said, far from selling out the bush, the National Party fought tooth and nail for the bush over a long period of time. What we will see here—and it should go on the record—is the delivery of a Labor Party outcome which will deliver nothing for regional Australia. In the process, they managed a peculiar type of arrangement where they have started sidestepping the ACCC and have cuddled up extremely closely to Telstra. In fact, I would have to say that the riding instructions almost seem to be coming directly from Telstra to the minister. This an arrangement par excellence as the minister is basically at their beck and call. He has sold his soul and now he is getting his policy from what will be a monopoly in the marketplace—that is, Telstra.

We all know what happens when you end up in a place where the market is dominated by a monopoly—that is, a very bad outcome for all consumers. This will be an especially bad outcome for regional consumers. In promoting the OPEL platform, which the Labor Party has gotten rid of, we were trying to promote a greater sense of dynamism and competition and a greater diversity in the marketplace so that people were treated fairly. But that has also been removed. So the Labor Party has not only defrauded regional Australia by taking away regional Australia’s $2 billion trust fund that was to give regional Australia a better outcome but also delivered a monopoly back to regional Australia. It is a monopoly which we can do very little about in the future because we do not have the powers in the Trade Practices Act to properly deal with it. The minister has also conformed to Telstra’s requests, especially on access regimes. It is a peculiar outcome that the minister has been unable to stand up and deal with a proper delivery of competition by finalising the access complaints that have been outstanding from the other competitors in the telecommunications market.

Where is this actually going to lead us? History will show that it was the National Party that went in to bargain for a better outcome for regional Australia—whether it was for a network reliability framework, the customer service guarantee, the universal service obligation, the $2 billion trust fund or the returns that were going to be deemed at the 30-day bank bill rate, which would have delivered about $480 million this year. To completely contradict what Senator Fielding said, the form of that was lifted from the National Heritage Trust of Australia Act. He really does not have any idea of the complexities and years of negotiations that went into this legislation and the outcomes that were delivered on behalf of regional Australia. At the end of the day, regional Australians were very happy with the fact that we had gone in to bat for them.

They knew that the National Party had to go into bat for them because they knew that the former Minister for Finance, Kim Beazley, had already said in 1985 that he was going to sell Telstra. We know that the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, said in October 2005 that the ownership of Telstra was not the issue. We also know that the Labor Party still has the power right now to take the shares that are currently by default still in public ownership and quarantine them, but it chooses not to. We know that the Labor Party, if it truly believed in the public ownership of the asset, has the capacity to buy it back if it wishes. But it does not. This clearly shows to the Australian people that the Labor Party was always going to sell Telstra. It started the ball rolling. What we in the National Party had to do was deal with the cards that were before us. The Labor Party was always going to sell Telstra. We knew that our coalition partners had as a policy structure the desire to sell Telstra, so we had to make do with the cards that were before us. With those cards that were before us we tried to deliver the best outcome that we possibly could. We really did have in mind the people of regional Australia when we did it.

Today, what is going to happen is that that outcome, that sense of keeping regional Australia connected to broadband and to a comparable position in telecommunications, is going to be stripped away. They are going to be left with yet another example of how the Labor Party just goes to the most marginalised and, from those who have the least, takes what they have off them. It is just like the removal of the Regional Partnerships program. This is the type of attitude that we are going to get from the Labor Party. This is the new Labor that we have now—the desertion of pensioners, the removal of the Regional Partnerships program, the isolation of regional Australia by the removal of a communications program that was there to assist and leave a body of money so that we could deal with these particular interests.

Is the minister going to leave an open line to the people out in Beulah, Longreach, Isisford or Tamworth? When things go wrong, are they going to call you up and are you going to look after them? Are you going to look after them like you did with the switch off of the CDMA network, where you just rolled over because you got the call from the policy gurus at Telstra who said, ‘You’re beholden to us’? That is the sort of delivery we are going to get from the minister from now on. That is the sort of corporate government for monopolies outside this building which will determine the agenda of the minister that we have here at the moment. That is going to be a very sad and peculiar outcome. The switch off of the CDMA network was amazing. That really showed regional Australia where this minister is and where his heart lies. One minute he wakes up and says, ‘The CDMA network is not up to scratch; therefore, you have to keep it so that Telstra complies with their agreement that they would keep the CDMA network open till there was an equivalent or better service from Next G.’ Then, out of the blue and without providing any empirical evidence, he decides that everything is fine now and he is going to switch it off. Where did the evidence come from? I suggest that it came out of Telstra’s head office. That is where that evidence came from—like every other part of this policy delivery that has now infected the Labor Party on telecommunications.

So we are about to lose the $2 billion that we set aside for investment in bringing a sense of fairness and equivalence to the people of regional Australia. It is about to go. This will be snuck through here today. It is going to go because the Labor Party are going to reinvest back into the areas where the service already exists, where the market could have provided the service. Who is going to be left out? The people they always leave out, the people of regional Australia. I hope the message goes loud and clear to the people in some of those new regional seats they hold, such as the seat of Flynn, that this is the sort of service you are going to get from a Labor Party government. This is what you got when you voted for them. Maybe some of those 250 or so people who were the difference in the vote in Flynn are starting to wonder whether, if they had voted in a different direction, they could have protected some of the services that they had.

Maybe the people in the seat of Leichhardt are going to start to scratch their heads and wonder why they delivered to Canberra a Labor government that is now deserting them. Maybe some of the people in some of the other regional seats are going to start to wonder why they gave a vote to a Labor Party senator. These are the sorts of questions that are clearly delivered in black-and-white form when the Labor Party—as it is doing right now, as it is going to do today—deserts regional Australia by the desertion of a fund that was specifically set up not to give a sense of largesse but to attempt to deliver some approximate sense of equality to all Australians. That is what you have got to be now: a government for all Australians, not just a government for those who are not pensioners and those who live in metropolitan cities but a government for all. This is a clear sign that the new Labor Party is really just a party for the middle class and the metropolitan cities.