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

This is going to be bigger than the excitement when you moved from that black-and-white set to a colour set. A firm timetable will also provide certainty for industry in planning for a post-analog environment.

I cannot stress enough the importance of a timetable. Manufacturers will not respond to targets. Manufacturers will not respond to ambitions. They will only agree to produce the equipment that we need to drive digital uptake if they believe there is a firm target. A firm timetable will also allow broadcasters to plan for the retirement of analog equipment. This is particularly important in regional and rural Australia. The previous government set a target of 2008. If the previous government had kept its word, we would have already switched off. It would be happening right now. But, as you can see from the statistics, without a firm commitment from the manufacturers, from the broadcasters and from all the other stakeholders in this sector, after seven years of digital television we have gone almost nowhere. It is only in the last 12 months, with the pressure from this government, and by setting the target, that we have seen industry agreement about the Freeview box and a manufacturing agreement to start producing low-cost equipment to put into the market. What will come from this legislation, ultimately, is an advertising campaign to inform Australians about how they can go about switching over. All of this stems from one decision that this government had the courage to make—unlike the previous government, which could not actually bite the bullet.

To be fair, Senator Eggleston and Senator Birmingham discussed some of the difficulties that the previous government faced. I am not being completely partisan, because this is a complex and difficult area. But what we see with the opposition amendments is that the government would be required to report on the switch-over readiness of an area six months before the scheduled switch-over date. Where the area is not deemed ready, they would develop a plan to rectify this or delay switch-over in this area. This is a recipe to go back to the future. This is a recipe to return to the situation of, ‘If you don’t want the possibility of new competitors in the market, you give people an economic incentive to go very slowly.’ That was a fundamental flaw in the previous government’s strategy. It gave an economic incentive for those who needed to help drive the change to actually drive the change incredibly slowly. That is the key difference. We have said, ‘No, we are going to push on; we are going to keep the pressure on and we are going to deliver this.’ It is not just about a better picture. It is about the interactivity; it is about the set-top boxes; it is about the capacity to record, shift and watch television when you want to watch it. It is a fundamental paradigm shift that will come from moving to digital and closing down analog. What the opposition’s amendments seek to do, in a very benign way, is to actually gut the incentive of key stakeholders to continue to drive the agenda. It may sound very benign, Senator Williams—