Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly look forward to the production of that work if it has been undertaken, but, if the government does not intend to do this work, I think it would be a valuable role for this committee to play in the future.

One of the key roles for the committee in the future, as the chair of the committee, Senator Fisher, has indicated, concerns the 10 per cent of the population that will be left out of the fibre-to-the-premises proposal. I do not think that anyone has yet proposed running fibre to every door in Australia. But the question then becomes: to what degree will the remaining communities be left with a service that is up to eight times slower than that in the metropolitan areas? The relative speed of the network in regional and metropolitan areas is very important because there will be services delivered down this system that we, in 2009, cannot even conceive of yet. So the relative speeds delivered to regional areas will remain of extreme importance. Will this project further entrench the digital divide or, for $43 billion, can we do better than an eight to one performance gap between those with and those without?

Finally, to return to where I began, why the government would want to embed a privatisation trigger in a project of this kind is a bit beyond me. We already heard Senator Lundy’s reference to the privatisation agenda of the previous government and yet we find in the minister’s and the Prime Minister’s announcement of the expanded NBN project exactly such a trigger embedded in this project. So we draw the Senate’s attention to the heading ‘Ownership’ at section 3 of the report, which essentially draws these questions to the attention of the committee when it refers to five years after the completion of the NBN. What does ‘completion’ mean for this kind of infrastructure? You might as well talk about the completion of the road network. What does five years after completion of the NBN mean? What rationale is there to re-privatise the network, given that we are here today because we are cleaning up, in part, the mess from the privatisation of an essential service?

There were very few details on the conditions which the government would set as a trigger to sell off the network and the nature of essential public services being offered on a for-profit basis, where the interest of shareholders will not always coincide with the public interest. So I very much look forward to the committee continuing to play the extremely valuable role that it has played so far. I would like to acknowledge the chair for her work, Senator Lundy for keeping things on track, and the hardworking staff and secretariat of the committee. I look forward to continuing its work.