Senator COONAN (12:52 PM) —I rise to make a few comments about the Trade Practices Amendment (Access Declarations) Bill 2008. The opposition are supporting the bill; it is a very effective and important bill which will clarify that access declarations and extension notices which extend the period of access declarations are not legislative instruments for the purposes of the Legislative Instruments Act 2003. It is a very technical amendment with some very practical implications for the industry. I have to say—seeing as it is an amendment to the Trade Practices Act—that enabling a competitive market structure has of course been a key focus of the coalition over the years. As part of that, of course, we introduced telecommunications specific sections into the Trade Practices Act and underpinned the introduction of the open access regime by opening up exchanges and the customer access network to full competition. I note that a couple of days ago the High Court in fact said that it was a legal and effective regime.

Consumers have been the real beneficiaries of competition through falling prices, with fixed line prices falling by almost 19 per cent and mobile service prices falling by a whopping 36 per cent. I do not think anyone would seriously argue how important competition is. It is a market, however, of continuous evolution, and services innovate at an exponential rate. With technology evolving so quickly there are always new challenges being faced by government. As I have said before, communications policy is never a ‘set and forget’ exercise. That is why we introduced a comprehensive broadband plan that would provide fast internet to 100 per cent of the population using a mix of technologies to be available by mid-2009.

This is in contrast to the Labor government’s muddled approach to broadband, with the extraordinary displays of incompetence by the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy. Having made much of Labor’s so-called broadband revolution, the rollout of the new fibre network was supposed to be a new direction for the industry and for the country. Senator Conroy had grandly promised voters that within just six months of gaining office work would begin on the hook-up of 98 per cent of Australians to high-speed broadband. It is diverting, to say the least, that commentators have not failed to notice that this commitment has slipped and it is already a broken election promise. As Malcolm Farr observed in the Sunday Telegraph recently:

It is obvious for all to see that steam age Senator Conroy—steam age Steve—is hopelessly out of his depth in understanding the myriad complex issues that he must face in this new network build. To begin with, Labor’s plan is mired in uncertainty as to what type of rollout it will be—fibre to the node or fibre to the home—who will build it, how access will be provided, how the access price will be determined, how long the build will take and how far it will reach. Added to these uncomprehended questions by the minister, the important point is that no-one yet knows how the government will use the $4.7 billion of taxpayers’ money slated for investment. It is true that $4.7 billion might get Senator Conroy’s network to Wollongong but not much past 75 per cent of the population. How regional Australia is to get some share of any benefit of this vast taxpayer spend is a quandary, and Senator Conroy seems unable to address it.

Typically, Labor has reached out to an expert task force to provide some answers. When it comes to a new network build I do not criticise the place of an expert task force to examine all the barriers to the build and to provide recommendations to government. Indeed, I did it myself. What I do criticise, however, is that Labor inherited a perfectly well formed expert task force that had been set up under the Howard government to oversee a new fibre network build. In his bumbling, stumbling way Senator Conroy disbanded this expert task force but retained a similar membership with essentially the same task, wasting months in the process. This is clearly a minister who is dithering and wasting time while the rest of the world is moving on to a digital future. It is not an auspicious beginning to the handling of a complex portfolio, and we can only hope in the interests of our own digital futures that someone in the Rudd government, perhaps Mr Lindsay Tanner, who, it seems, is taking some supervisory role over Senator Conroy, will come to the rescue of this increasingly desperate looking and nervous sounding minister.