Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

As a participating member I also welcome the production of this second interim report of the Select Committee on the National Broadband Network. I also join Senator Ludlam in congratulating Senator Fisher on her outstanding chairmanship of this committee and for the very good recommendations that are made in the second interim report. I commend them to the government and I look forward to the government acting on those recommendations.

This report confirms the fiasco that has become Labor’s national broadband network policy. Senator Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, has presided over the complete collapse of his election policy. We had Senator Lundy here today essentially admitting that this committee, which the government opposed, has been the vehicle by which the failure of this mark I NBN policy of the government’s has been exposed as a complete and utter failure. Of course, it does not surprise us at all that it has failed so comprehensively, because the then Labor opposition simply wrote this policy on the back of an envelope in the lead-up to the last election, having lifted the policy from the proposition that Telstra put to the former government. And even the contribution of $4.7 billion which the Labor government proposed to make was a straight lift from Telstra’s original proposal to our government to have a subsidy for a fibre-to-the-node network. The Labor Party did no analysis or work on a fibre-to-the-node network—as to how or whether it could be built. It simply went to the election having stolen that particular policy.

In our view the whole tender process which this government embarked on was doomed to failure from the outset. Indeed, the minister was completely humiliated last December by his own department, excluding the current operator of the current broadband network in this country—and I refer, of course, to Telstra—despite his boasting widely, both publicly and privately, that he had a very flexible process that would allow anybody to put any sort of bid in and that non-conforming bids would of course be considered. It was not, of course, the minister who excluded Telstra. It was the departmental secretary who acted upon no fewer than five sets of legal advice to remove Telstra from the process despite it being obvious that, at the end of the day, Telstra were the only company capable of building a fibre-to-the-node network in this country. And to be excluded on the basis that on the day they submitted their tender they did not submit a small business participation plan is ludicrous in the extreme.

So 18 months after this government was elected, and after the expenditure of $20 million of precious taxpayers’ money, the whole of Senator Conroy’s mark I NBN plan has completely collapsed in a heap and there is nothing to show for it. Indeed, in the 18 months that he has been the minister, Senator Conroy has done nothing to advance the cause of more access to broadband by Australians. All he has to show for it is $20 million of taxpayers’ money down the drain on this failed tender process, and the insult to the residents of rural and regional Australia by his wanton cancellation of the contract which our government signed with Optus and Elders to bring high-speed broadband to a million residents of rural and regional Australia at a cost to the government of $1 billion with an investment by that consortium of $1 billion. That has all gone. That would have almost been completed by now and there is nothing to show for it whatsoever.

In what can only be described as a flagrant and extravagant cover-up of the failure of that particular policy, this government has come out with the extraordinary announcement that it is going to create another government entity to spend $43 billion on extending fibre to 90 per cent of Australian residential and business premises. This is the most extraordinarily reckless and irresponsible policy announced on the run we have seen, I think, in this country’s history. As Senator Ludlam pointed out, when I asked the question today about the cost-benefit analysis, ‘Oh, no, we don’t have to do a cost-benefit analysis. We are just going to spend $43 billion but who needs a cost-benefit analysis’ to spend—as they boast—the biggest single infrastructure investment ever proposed in the history of this country. There is no business plan and yet the government asserts that this will be a commercial investment. If it had come out and been honest and said, ‘Look, it will never be commercial but we think taxpayers should subsidise it anyway and we are just going to go ahead and build it,’ that would be one thing. But it has come out and said that this will be a commercial exercise, done through this public-private partnership which will eventually be privatised. No-one in this country has ever established that fibre to the premises could possibly be a commercial business proposition in this country. We believe that there is no prospect whatsoever of commercial viability. For it to be commercially viable, the prices you would have to charge would be such that nobody could afford to use it.

What they are proposing is the effective renationalisation of the fixed line network in this country which may, as I detect from Senator Ludlam’s remarks, please him. But it certainly should not please the rest of Australia to have the renationalisation of a fixed line network in this way, particularly when there will be some $20 billion at least of taxpayers’ money put at risk in an investment in a particular fixed line technology which many have noted will take another 10 years to roll out. And by then we have no idea what the capacity and possibilities will be with alternative communications technologies—most particularly, of course, mobile and wireless. There is a massive flight from fixed line to mobile and wireless broadband going on right now. What will it be like in 10 years time when this thing is finally built? I suspect this will be one of the all-time great white elephants this country has seen.

The government, very secretly, is not even putting into this the $4.7 billion which it only has because of our sale of Telstra through the Communications Fund and the proceeds from T3. They are not even going to put that in. They have very secretly decided that they are only going to put in the $2.4 billion from the Communications Fund and borrow the rest. The whole process is shrouded in secrecy. We are not going to be shown the expert panel’s report upon which this is based. We are not going to be shown the ACCC report.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.