Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity (Senator Conroy) to questions without notice asked by Senators Barnett and Humphries today, relating to the National Broadband Network.

I particularly draw attention to Senator Conroy’s shameless defence of his government’s lack of accountability on the question of the National Broadband Network. I think every Australian taxpayer, no matter what their needs with respect to broadband and no matter what their location in this country, ought to be deeply concerned about this government’s approach towards this massive new infrastructure, which will cost taxpayers billions of dollars, which has not defined well the extent of its coverage, the cost structure that it is going to face or the extent of the take-up that it requires in order to meet its expectations and which represents an enormous risk to the Australian taxpayer and to the Australian community.

In the course of his answers today, Senator Conroy described seeking further information about the National Broadband Network—for example, a cost-benefit analysis of the network’s value to the Australian people—as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Here we have the largest investment ever made by an Australian government in infrastructure by a long shot and a basic preliminary analysis of that project is rejected by this government. Only a little while ago, the government’s own Infrastructure Australia recommended:

In order to demonstrate that the Benefit Cost Analysis is indeed robust, full transparency of the assumptions, parameters and values which are used in each Benefit Cost Analysis is required.

What do we hear from this government? We hear: ‘We don’t need that. It’s too expensive. It’ll take too long. It’ll hold things up.’ But, of course, none of those things are true. What we know about this National Broadband Network should fill all of us with a great deal of dread—not because it is not an ambitious, grand plan. Grand plans are fine, as long as you have the wherewithal to back up the assumptions that you make about what this grand plan is going to achieve.

This minister has a touch of the Rex Connors about him. He has a determination to make this thing happen that seems to know no obstacle and a desire to push aside the critics and plough ahead with what he wants to do without fully explaining to the Australian people how he is going to get there. For example, we have heroic assumptions about the level of take-up of this new scheme. The scheme requires take-up of somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of available consumers. That is an enormously large level of take-up to make this all work, when countries like the United States have achieved 25 per cent of consumers taking up their options. Even in South Korea, only 40 per cent of customers have taken up similar products.

The level of investment here seems to be out of kilter with the hard facts about both need and expectation of take-up. It is worth looking at what is going on in the United States at the moment, for example. The United States is also investing federal taxpayers’ dollars in broadband initiatives, but it is investing a total of only $7 billion—across the entire United States of America. On a per capita basis, Australia is investing 100 times more in broadband than the United States, the home of the internet. Is that wise? Is that justified? Can the minister explain why the government is making such a tangibly larger, more risky investment in these circumstances than even the United States of America is making? No, he cannot, because he does not believe that these things need to be done. We are told that in due course information will be laid on the table about the National Broadband Network—not a cost-benefit analysis or the kind of careful work before projects begin recommended by Infrastructure Australia, but in due course some facts and figures will be placed on the table, no doubt at the point beyond which it will be impossible to return.

I think we should all be fearful about this exercise. I think we need to be asking questions and demanding answers and requiring the government to justify, point by point, the basis of this new national scheme. We need to know how much it will cost Australians to get access to voice and broadband services, what the revenues of the business will be, how it will be commercially justifiable when, for example, it avoids entirely the use of wireless, which is the fastest-growing internet element in Australia at the moment, how it justifies the heroic assumptions it makes about take-up and how it is that the Australian community can come out of this with a decent investment and not lose a great deal of money in the process. That is what we are asking for here and, if the government cannot supply it, we have to ask why.