Mr TURNBULL (7:47 PM) —In response to the remarks of the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, I am not sure whether the notes relate to another set of amendments but the point here is a very basic one. In Telstra’s submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee—and I do not agree with all of its submission but I do agree with this part of it—the point is made:

as its submission goes on—

There are a large number of licensed carriers who do not provide services to the public but hold carrier licences for other reasons. The Telstra submission goes on to point out:

The simple fact of the matter is that everybody in business, if they can manage it, would like to cut out the middleman. They will see the retail service providers—the private sector part of the telecommunications industry in this NBN world, if we get to it—as troublesome middlemen that they will not want to deal with, and we will discuss that further in the next amendment. The consequence will be that NBN, acting quite rationally in terms of its own commercial objectives, will creep further and further into the province of the retail service providers. What we will see is the gradual evolution of the NBN from being originally a wholesale carriage provider to becoming a wholesale carriage provider with a large retail, government and corporate business. In other words, the only part of the retail telecommunications business that it will not be undertaking is that to residential and small businesses. But all of the larger customers will be eligible for assault from NBN.

I make one other point. A company may become a carrier for the purpose of this—so eligible to be sold to by a carriage service provider, eligible to be dealt with by the NBN under this clause, simply because it is in the business of supplying telecommunications services of a completely different kind as part of its business. It might be a mobile reseller, for example. So there is a huge scope for the NBN to puncture through the limitations that, supposedly, the government wants to set up around it. This is going to become a telecommunications equivalent of Frankenstein. It will literally take over large sections of the telecommunications business in Australia and it will do so unfairly and unjustly because it benefits from a massive subsidy from the government. Remember that there is no level playing field between the NBN and anybody else because it has access to unlimited funds with no commercial or even realistic return on the capital expected.

This is a shocking invasion of the private sector, a shocking incursion on competition, and, if the government is serious about NBN being wholesale only, it should support this amendment, which, as I said, has broad support within the telecommunications sector.

Question negatived.