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Monday, 4 July 2011
Page: 7383

Mr BRIGGS (Mayo) (19:03): I rise to speak on the NBN bill, the Telecom­munications Legislation Amend-ment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011, which is before the House and which we are debating. I make the point at the beginning that the coalition, as we always have been, is supportive of fast broadband. It is a worthy and important goal. The development of fast broadband, especially the development of accessible fast broadband at cost-effective prices, is a great economic boon for our country. But we continue to make the point that it is not a case of picking winners in this debate but rather one of looking at a mixture of technologies, which is the important way to go into the future. Countries like the United States of America, with its President Obama, have realised that. We see here in Australia a government born out of central planning days, and we have just heard the member for Page walk us through her distrust of the private sector while talking about how the private sector will not build it because there is not enough return in it, although I note that, as I understand it, the standing policy of the Australian Labor Party is still to sell NBN Co. as soon as it is established. So somehow there has been a mistransmission over the talking points given to the member for Page, because her contribution was questioning the ability of the private sector to invest in networks such as this. She says the private sector would not build something like this. Well, they do build these sorts of networks all the time. In fact, they have built a mobile network.

Ms Saffin interjecting—

Mr BRIGGS: Member for Page, as you walk around with your mobile phone in your electorate, which is a regional electorate, you get to use your mobile phone and your wireless devices because the private sector built those towers. So it is interesting that the member for Page thinks that the government is all good and everything that is required needs to be built by the government. That is the view of those opposite, but, of course, we have trust in the private sector and we think the private sector provides services at a far more efficient and cost-effective rate than what government ever does.

Mr Stephen Jones: Except when it comes to climate change. Then you want to pick winners.

Mr BRIGGS: In fact, that is not true at all, Member for Throsby.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr KJ Thomson ): The member for Throsby will cease interjecting and the member for Mayo will not respond to interjections from the member for Throsby.

Mr BRIGGS: He was completely distracting me, Mr Deputy Speaker. You are right to be raising those issues. When it comes to this bill, I think it highlights how much the government has failed when it comes to this issue. It highlights very much how they find a reasonable idea and turn it into a complete shambles. That very much sums up the NBN itself. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, we support fast broadband, but this is spending billions and billions of dollars of taxpayers' money unnecessarily, excessively and imprudently. We have seen the risk this government is exposed to when it spends such large amounts of money. We have the very sad examples of the green loans and the Home Insulation Program and with that program the government were not even able to put roof insulation batts into people's houses without burning the houses down. We have had the school halls program where they managed to spend about double what the private sector could have spent on building them. We have seen recent examples of digital set-top boxes. They have been spending double the amount of money for which Gerry Harvey or another retailer could have provided them. So when this government gets involved in spending large amounts of money, the Australian people shiver with fear—and so they should. That is why we saw today economic figures indicating a lack of confidence by the Australian people in the economy with housing and consumer numbers plummeting. That is driven by a lack of confidence in a government that is not competent. This is another bill which highlights the lack of competence of this government. There are various aspects in this bill which relate directly to my electorate such as the $40 billion spend on a network, which the Auditor-General's report today reflected upon, that Infrastructure Australia has not even seen. Even though they are meant to be looking at the top infrastructure priorities, the NBN has not been referred to Infrastructure Australia and there has not been a cost-benefit analysis done. This bill touches on the deployment of fibre and that will have an impact in my electorate as it will happen in new housing developments.

I think the arguments articulated by the member for Wentworth and the member for Bradfield have been very well made. The dissenting report highlights the problem that the government is creating for itself. It is trying to centralise and take away the benefits of competition when it comes to new developments. The real effect of this will be higher costs for people building homes in new housing estates. I have many new housing estates in my area, particularly in Mount Barker and Strathalbyn. These are already contentious areas, particularly the Mount Barker development which was forced through by the state Labor government without any consultation with the local community. Now we are seeing the federal Labor government create laws which are going to make it more expensive for people to buy houses in these developments. That was a point well made by the member for Wentworth and the member for Bradfield and very well made in the dissenting report into this issue.

The other area I want to touch upon briefly is that, when it comes to the deployment of fibre into electorates like mine, it is not easy to put it underground. I note that the NBN Co. documents, which were released last December, indicated that they wished the government to allow them to override local council regulations to ensure that they could roll out the fibre overhead, or aerial as it is described. This is a major concern in an electorate such as mine. The Adelaide Hills is the most beautiful electorate in the country without doubt. It is quite obviously not appropriate to put the fibre in overhead cables in a bushfire-prone zone over the longer distances. I understand this will be the intention of the NBN Co. This is a concern in my community and people have been raising this issue with me. As I have a semi-regional and regional electorate, the longer distances will mean that when it actually does get to us—for towns over 1,000 if you believe the government's rhetoric—there will be overhead hanging fibre used. I think this is something that the government needs to address very quickly and swiftly.

I am not the only electorate with this sort of environment. I know the member for Bradfield has raised this issue in regard to his inner-city electorate. Of course it is a lot cheaper for NBN Co. to roll out the fibre overhead. No doubt the arrangements with Telstra may have changed that slightly, but I do not think they would have changed it all that much in an electorate like mine.

This is an issue which I will raise in my local community and ask them how they intend to react if the government decides to roll out overhead wires through the Adelaide Hills, particularly through the bushfire-prone areas where most of the overhead power lines have been removed and put underground. If it is the intention of the NBN Co. going forward to do the same thing in my area, it does raise significant questions about how the business model of the NBN Co. has been planned and what the associated costs will be with using either underground or overhead wires.

My electorate is a black spot area where government funding is required to ensure that there is an equality of service. It is a point that we have always made on this side of the House. In outer metro and regional areas, like my electorate and the electorates of the member for Grey and the member for Barker, there is a need for government intervention because the market fails in those areas, and we have said that all along. Quite clearly it does not fail in city areas, and this is where the big mistake of the government spending billions of dollars unnecessarily and imprudently creates a real risk for taxpayers with the waste that we will see through this spending.

We heard the member for Page earlier say that spending $26 or $27 billion is such a Labor Party thing to do. It is a billion dollars between friends, and we only have $106 billion of debt and a $50 billion deficit this year. This is a fundamental issue about the management of our country. If we look around the world today, one of the great challenges is our Western cousins who are in deep financial trouble because they have spent too much money over too many years. We have seen this Labor government use the public purse without any effort to ensure the money is spent properly and without any effort to ensure that their policies benefit the Australian community. Quite clearly in some areas of the country there needs to be spending to ensure that services are kept up to the level which other Australians get access to, but in the city areas this makes no sense at all. This is an overbuild of existing speed which the market will meet and has been meeting. To think that over the next 10 years we are going to spend billions and billions of dollars of Australian taxpayers' money laying out fibre in areas, which the market would have met, is ridiculous.

In addition to that we are seeing questions about how it will be happening in areas such as mine where clearly fibre is not the answer. In hilly areas I suspect that fibre is not the appropriate answer nor in regional areas because there is difficulty in laying it out or indeed whether you can lay it out at all. It will be interesting to see how NBN Co. deals with that issue. I will certainly be raising it in my local community. If the rollout is to occur in my electorate, in what parts of the electorate will it be, how will it be done and how is the NBN Co. planning to do it in the future? It is a concern. The member for Bradfield raised this concern in his electorate. He raised the point that communities do not want overhead cables anymore. Communities have been trying to move away from that, and there are very good safety reasons in my area for that to be the case. So when it comes to the deployment of fibre in the electorate of Mayo, I think there are legitimate questions to be answered by the government about how this rollout is planned.

The opposition see some merit in this bill. However, we have made some very prudent suggestions, which the member for Went­worth outlined earlier, to improve the bill and to reintroduce competition, which is a major concern when it comes to the NBN. The government have turned what was a competitive market, or 30 years of telecommunications policy about creating a competitive market, on its head by creating another government monopoly that will have the same challenges. I note that the member for Lyne last week made the point about government monopolies not having worked in the past and not being likely to work in the future, and I think that was a very good point. Where the government has gone with this policy is a major concern. It is spending far too much on a wrongheaded policy in areas where money does not need to be spent rather than focusing government effort on areas where money should be spent and allowing the market to meet the demand.

Quite obviously, part of the mix here is wireless. That is where people want portability. They want to be able to use their iPads and their phones and other devices around the place. At the same time, there is no doubt that there is a place for fixed lines, and that is where the market will meet that need. For the government to spend $40 billion odd of taxpayers' money—money that we do not have, borrowed money—makes no sense at all at a time when we already have over $100 billion in net debt and when we see around the globe the great problems that are being caused by governments accumulating debt. Those on the other side will say: 'Don't worry about it. We'll be back to surplus in a couple of years. We've got this wafer-thin surplus that is on the books thanks to the commodity boom and thanks to the high prices that other countries are paying for our products.' But we know that the debt this Labor government is accumulating will not be paid off by this government. It will not even attempt to pay it off because it keeps coming up with harebrained schemes on how to waste the money of Australians, such as spending twice the amount it should on school halls and burning down people's houses with its home insulation program.

I support the remarks of the member for Wentworth and the amendments he is proposing. I also put on the record the concern in my community about the prospect of having overhead cables laid out. That is an issue that I suspect, Mr Deputy Speaker, we will be talking about more often in this House in the coming months and years.