Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Well, that makes it pretty crystal clear! The statements by this government that it is setting NBN Co. up as the provider of last resort are not truthful at all. They are not setting NBN Co. up as the provider of last resort; they are setting up NBN Co. as the default provider of fibre at these greenfields sites. That is what the minister's flippant response about choice means. For a developer who is establishing a new housing development, the choice is, quite literally, to go and lodge an application with NBN Co. and get the fibre rolled out for free or to go to a greenfields operator and pay to have the fibre rolled out. That is the choice the minister wants people to make. There is no requirement for a period of delay for them to consider using a greenfields operator first. They can just go to NBN Co. up-front, first thing, and simply get them to roll out the fibre.

Who on Earth would think that in that type of situation we would see a single greenfields fibre provider around Australia left in business after a few months of operation of that system? Of course everybody is going to take the free option. This government knows a thing or two about offering free options. It offered free pink batts in people's roofs. We saw how that ended: it ended in utter misery for householders, for homeowners and for many, many businesses—who ultimately were put out of business by the very scheme that set up some of those businesses in the first place. This government have no understanding and no credibility when it comes to how the decisions they make impact on the operation of the market. They have no understanding or credibility as to how their decisions impact on private business and private jobs. They are creating this giant new multibillion-dollar government monopoly called the NBN Co. And, in doing so, they are happy to squeeze everybody else out of the market—everybody else. And they do not seem to care about the consequences of that—for developers, for innovation in this space, for the timely delivery of fibre services in this development. They are just flippant about the whole thing. For them, of course, it is all about trying to make the fictitious economic model of the NBN Co. stack up. And we know that they will never manage to make the NBN Co.'s economic or financial modelling stack up; but they are putting in place every possible impediment to private providers, every possible impediment to other businesses, to ensure that the NBN Co. model is underpinned as a true monopoly provider. And we all know what happens with monopoly providers in the end—Senator Conroy has given us many lectures on that in this place in the telecommunications space. In the end, the prices go up, innovation goes out the door, service gets more sluggish—and that, of course, is what Australia's housing developers will face—