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

I thank you for that question, Senator Macdonald. Senator Macdonald appears to be calling for the restoration of OPEL. The claim from those opposite seems to be that it would have delivered high-speed broadband to Queenslanders. By calling for OPEL to be reinstated, Senator Macdonald is stating that he would spend taxpayers’ money on a project even though the terms of the contract were not met. Furthermore, Senator Macdonald is repeatedly misleading the Australian public. His statement is categorically untrue and demonstrates that those opposite are grossly irresponsible.

The Rudd government committed to honouring the OPEL funding agreement according to its terms. The conditions precedent written in by Senator Helen Coonan, my predecessor, required OPEL to provide coverage reasonably equivalent to 90 per cent of the 527,747 underserved premises identified by the then Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. In other words, OPEL was required to cover approximately five per cent of Australian premises identified as underserved. As I have said before, OPEL’s coverage would have been far less than the figure claimed by people such as Senator Minchin, who talks about 99 per cent. In any event, the assessments showed that OPEL failed to demonstrate that it was able to meet its required coverage. It failed to meet the contractual terms set out by Senator Helen Coonan. So let us be clear: the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy— (Time expired)