Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Issues) Bill 2005, which will be debated tonight and through this week, is one of the most draconian and un-Australian pieces of legislation that this parliament has ever seen. This bill will effectively appropriate property belonging to a private company without any compensation whatsoever. For that reason, the coalition will be opposing that part of the bill that effectively causes confiscation of property without compensation.

The bill does a number of things: it makes changes to the telecommunications access regime, it removes technical impediments to the operation of the anticompetitive conduct regime, it makes the universal service obligation and customer service guarantee clearer and therefore more enforceable, it extends the obligation to provide priority assistance to those with life-threatening conditions to service providers other than Telstra and it enables breaches of civil penalty provisions to be dealt with more quickly.

There are parts of this bill to which the opposition has no objection—in fact, there are some parts which the opposition would be in favour of supporting. But as long as this bill contains the provision of appropriation of property without compensation the opposition will not be supporting it. The provision to structurally and functionally separate Telstra at the pain of great penalties is a step too far and it is one that the opposition, for reasons that the Senate will hear during this debate, will not be supporting.

We hope that the government will see sense—that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, will get off his high horse and realise that this Senate is elected by the people of Australia and that it has a function to play in this parliament. We have seen all of the media commentary by five under-pressure ministers today—a pretty amateur approach today—to put across a message that the Senate is being uncooperative, which is quite incorrect. But for all the government spin that we have come to accept as normal from Mr Rudd and his government this Senate actually comprises elected people who are here to perform their duties in looking after the interests of all Australians. They have a duty to make sure that the rights of all Australians—and they have obligations as well as rights—cannot be taken away by a government in the capricious way in which this legislation attempts to do it.

This bill seeks to prevent Telstra from acquiring specified bands of spectrum which could be used for advanced wireless broadcast service unless it structurally separates and divests its hybrid coaxial cable network and its interests in Foxtel. In fact, the bill gives Telstra the opportunity to give three binding undertakings: an undertaking to structurally separate its retail operation from all or some of its networks, an undertaking to divest itself of its interest in Foxtel and an undertaking to divest itself of the pay-TV cable network that it owns in Adelaide, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

If it does not do that, then this bill will provide that Telstra will not be allocated and will not be able to use the designated spectrum that it is assumed is vitally essential to its mobile broadband business. What this really means is that the government and the minister are holding a gun to the heads of the millions of Telstra shareholders to fall in with the government and give away their current network at practically no cost—otherwise they will pay the consequences.

I am pleased that Minister Conroy has come into the chamber, because he will know better than I that, when Telstra was having a little tiff with the former coalition government a few years ago, Senator Conroy became very palsy-walsy with Telstra. He went to them and said, ‘I’ve got no idea of what a communications policy should involve. I have no staff; I have no ability. So you tell me what you would want.’ Telstra gave him some advice and mentioned a figure of $4.7 billion—and, lo and behold, that became the Labor Party policy. When Labor won government, Minister Conroy suddenly found that it was not quite that simple. He first of all destroyed the OPEL network, which was up and running and which, by now, would have been providing high-speed broadband to most of Australia. Senator Conroy, capriciously again, simply cancelled that contract and threatened those involved that, if they wanted to have an interest in telecommunications in Australia in the future, they had better forget about any High Court action against the government.

Then we went through an expensive farce involving the offer to tender process, which cost the Australian taxpayer $20 million. At the end of that, Senator Conroy realised again that his policy and that of his government was up in the air, all over the ship and going nowhere. Then he had this brilliant idea that he would put in $43 billion worth of someone’s money. Because we have not seen the implementation study we are not sure whose money it was going to be, but we were all led to believe that 51 per cent of that money would be Commonwealth investment and 49 per cent would somehow be private investment. With the $43 billion, Senator Conroy was going to build this National Broadband Network, which would effectively take over the trunk lines, if I can call them that, of Telstra, Optus and anyone else who might have them. And the government would not brook any competition from Telstra or Optus because the figures, if you look at them, mean that for $43 billion this NBN network simply cannot operate. It is a commercial lemon. There is no way in the world it could make a profit or even hold its own in competition with Telstra, who effectively have a similar sort of network amongst the high-using parts of our country.

What did Senator Conroy then work out? If he went into competition with Telstra, with the $43 billion and the amount that he would have to charge customers to get the network to even remotely look like paying, he would be out on his commercial ear, one might say. Quite clearly, Telstra with its existing network, and Optus and the other carriers, would be able to provide a service at about the cost they are providing it now. The NBN, on even the simplest back-of-the-envelope figures, would have to double or triple the monthly payment for those people wanting to use the NBN service. Who would go to the NBN service when they could get a service from Telstra or Optus or Vodafone for about one-third of the cost? Nobody. Competition is not what Senator Conroy wants, because NBN would fall flat on its face commercially.

So what did he do? He then came along with the bullyboy tactics and said to Telstra, ‘We want you to give us your network and for you to get out of the wholesale area so that we won’t have any competition in that area and we might—just might—be able to make ends meet.’ This bill actually puts into legislative form that confiscation of property to ensure that Telstra is not there to compete with this NBN, because, if it did, the NBN would have no chance of being commercially successful. Even as it is, it will not have much of a chance of being profitable.

This comes from a government that cannot even run a giveaway insulation program. Surely, if you are giving away insulation, you could devise a program that would work. It is not rocket science; in fact, anyone could do it—anyone, that is, except Mr Garrett and the Rudd government. They have made such a mess of that simple piece of policy implementation; how on earth could they possibly run this National Broadband Network?

What they have done with the network, of course, is fill it up with old mates. We all know of Senator Conroy’s action in ensuring that Mike Kaiser, a defrocked, I might say, member of the Queensland parliament who had to resign from the Queensland parliament for electoral fraud, is now on board with the NBN company. Why? Because of his expertise? Or did he win his $450,000 job in competition with many other people who have expertise in the government relations area? No, he got it non-competitively, because the minister came along and said to the boss of NBN Co., ‘I’ve appointed you to NBN Co. It’s not a bad job and you’re not a bad fellow, but you’re there because I appointed you. I’ve got a mate up in Queensland—part of my faction. He’s looking for a $450,000 job. I think he’d be very suitable for this appointment.’

This is the sort of situation you had with the NBN Co. as it commenced. If that is how it commenced its operations, heaven knows how it will finish up. We might wonder how many of the other NBN Co. appointments were non-competitive. I think someone said that about 40 per cent of them—perhaps Senator Conroy would confirm that—were made without competition, and one wonders how many of them are card-carrying members of the Labor Party and, perhaps more importantly, of the faction in which Senator Conroy is closely involved.

This is the body that the Rudd government wants to give a monopoly to in Australia. To do that, it is going to confiscate from an existing private company certain property by threatening the company with the fact that if they do not give it up the government will make their business life untenable in Australia. This is a draconian and very un-Australian part of the legislation. That part should be defeated and hopefully will be defeated. I call on Senator Conroy again to split this bill so that the consumer elements of this legislation are divided from the rest of the bill and dealt with by the Senate. As I say, generally speaking, that would get the support of the coalition. It is a simple way to get through that legislation. But, no, the Labor Party is playing its old tricks: have some good legislation which everyone agrees with but hook it into something that is draconian and un-Australian and would not get support anywhere. I again ask Senator Conroy to split the bill so that the consumer provisions can be dealt with.

We had a debate earlier today about the implementation study. According to Senate procedure, we were not supposed to be dealing with this bill until the implementation study was tabled. At many an estimates committee meeting, we inquired of Senator Conroy and his department how this would be funded. We asked whether private business interests would be in there, whether it would be done by a government bond, what the interest rate would be and who would pay any losses in this company—all those sorts of things—and from Senator Conroy and his department we continually got the answer, ‘That’ll all been made clear in the implementation study.’ We all expected, as reasonable people, that the implementation study would be released by the end of February. In fact, Senator Conroy implied that. I concede to Senator Conroy that in a recent estimates hearing he said that it might not be released by the end of February 2010. I concede that, Senator Conroy. But your action and the action of your department was that, every time a question was asked, the answer came back: ‘Don’t you worry about that. We can’t answer this now, but when you see the implementation study all will be revealed.’ But, of course, all has not been revealed.

Mr Acting Deputy President Bishop, I ask you to do some sums on the back of an envelope. Work out how many subscribers there are in Australia at the moment. How many are there? There are about seven million households in Australia. Divide that into the income that the NBN Co. will need to earn in order to see what it is going to cost people to hook into the NBN. If you look at average prices now of about $50 to $60 a month for an ordinary person using similar services and then multiply that—anyone can do these figures; you can do them on the back of an envelope—you will see that you simply cannot make money out of this NBN. Senator Conroy said to us: ‘You will see it. All will be revealed when the implementation study is tabled.’ But where is the implementation study? Where is this document that was going to tell us all what needs to be done?’ Senator Conroy, for reasons that only he knows about—I was not in the debate this morning, but I understand that in his 20-minute rant he did not even indicate—