Economic and Finance Committee: National Broadband Network

Adjourned debate on motion of Mr Odenwalder:

That the 88^th report of the committee, entitled National Broadband Network, be noted.

(Continued from 2 December 2015.)

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Schubert is going to open the batting.

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (11:47): Thank you, Deputy Speaker. Actually, I hope by now Australia has won the second test in New Zealand. I think we are on track.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I don't know. Are we allowed to have scores? It's not normal for us to have—

Mr KNOLL: No, sorry; we are moving on.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! It is not normal for us to have ongoing and progress scores but, if someone wants to give us a nod and a wink, we could all share that news together in a quiet manner. Member for Schubert.

Mr KNOLL: It is my pleasure to rise here to talk about the NBN—a project that many people across country South Australia are viewing via the internet, potentially via the NBN. Maybe they are watching on Fox Sports or other channels the closure of the second test in New Zealand. This inquiry was done prior to my elevation onto the wonderful Economic and Finance Committee. Having said that, I have taken a keen interest in having a look at the document and providing some brief thoughts on it.

Certainly, the National Broadband Network is extremely important to helping South Australia progress, to helping small businesses start up and to helping unlock the global trade potential of the internet. This is certainly never more evident than in what we see in country areas where, traditionally, access to broadband services has been quite limited.

I will give you a great little example. I am a lover of all things Sir Thomas Playford, and I managed to find one of his biographies on an online bookstore. It turns out that the online bookstore is just a little website run by a couple who live in Laura in the Mid North of the state. They have a website. They sell these old and rare books. I purchased one, and they sent it all the way down to me.

I thought, 'How fantastic is that?' Previously, you would have had to have a shop in a higher traffic location in order to get people to see what you were doing, but these people have managed to do it from the town that gave us Golden North ice cream.

Late last year, I was also given the opportunity to visit outback South Australia with a couple of other members of parliament. We happened to fly all the way out to a beautiful place called Cowarie Station, which is about as far away from most other things as one can get. We met a beautiful family—a mother and daughter; the rest of the family were out doing things across the station—and one of the biggest issues they had was in relation to accessing the internet, especially given that the School of the Air, which used to provide everything in the post, now provides all of their materials online, which is fantastic as long as you can download them.

They were lamenting the fact that they are on the interim satellite service and that they struggle. In fact, it took our hosts an hour and a half to download a four-minute video to show us. But, having said that, they were quite excited about the launch of the first satellite—the name of which escapes me, but I think it is something to do with cowboys; Sky Muster? Is that a thing? Anyway, they were really hopeful that the increased bandwidth was going to be able to help them to get a good education. They had a young son who at that stage was about three years old, and they were looking at how they were going to be able to educate him out there in remote South Australia.

The other example I would like to give is of a place that is around 70 kilometres from here, a little place called Krondorf, which is just south of Tanunda, up on a hill and just up the road from Rockford Winery. It is a little place, and even though it is less than a kilometre out of Tanunda, its residents struggle to get the internet. They have been waiting on the NBN to come to be able to solve their problem.

As it turns out, a local internet provider has had the ingenuity to actually build small towers and provide access to pockets of people who have been previously been unable to, and do so in a commercial manner. This means that these people, in the past month or two, had the power of broadband internet unlocked. There have certainly been some joyful scenes in Krondorf, and probably a decent glass of Rod and Spur or Basket Press has been poured in celebration.

Having looked at the report, I can see that it has a number of worthy suggestions. I do have to opine that this does seem to be quite a political document, and one that potentially—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

Mr KNOLL: —fights the federal Labor government's fight on their behalf, but that is okay. I would like to look at recommendation 6, which states:

All South Australian local governments implement a digital economy strategy and monitor its performance.

Recommendation 7 states:

The state and local governments should serve as exemplars for the benefits of the NBN in the delivery of services, particularly in rural and remote areas.

I think recommendation 7 is extremely important, especially when we look at the record of this state Labor government when it comes to instituting IT systems that require internet access in order for those records to be provided across the state.

I want to turn to a couple of examples where I think recommendation 7 needs to be acted upon quite swiftly, and maybe where this state Labor government needs to get their act together. We start off with the Enterprise Patient Administration System, which I know has had a lot of discussion in this place. Originally billed as a $220 million project, it has now blown out to $450 million.

Whilst that project was supposed to cover all hospitals in South Australia, it is currently in Noarlunga, it is currently in the Repat (but we are closing that down), and everything else has been suspended to make sure that it is going into the new RAH when that opens. Unfortunately, I do not think that is going to happen either. If we are talking here about—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

Mr KNOLL: If we are talking about state governments being exemplars, state governments should serve as exemplars for the benefits of the NBN in the delivery of services. I do not think EPAS is a great exemplar of how the NBN could and should be used, so maybe there is a little bit of work there to do.

We then move on to RISTEC, which is a system that the finance department is supposed to use in order to be able to cover off on the collection and management of taxation. It is a project that started out at $22.6 million and, 13 years later, ended up at $54 million.

Mr Picton: These are all internal systems.

Mr KNOLL: That require decent internet access. Again, recommendation 7 deals with the state government being an exemplar of how to use IT services. I think that pointing out how this state Labor government is really bad at using IT services is valid in the context of one of the recommendations of the report; a bipartisan report, as I am given to understand. The other thing to do with RISTEC is the fact that stage 3 of the project was scrapped. Not only did we spend $54 million, well over double the cost, we also did not get the outcomes.

We then move on to CASIS, a system which was supposed to fix a lot of long-running issues with regard to managing concession payments on behalf of the Department for Communities and Social Inclusion. It is a project that wasted $7 million before, again, it was scrapped. Now we have a new man on the scene and his name is COLIN. He is supposed to only cost $2.2 million, and I wish COLIN all the best in his endeavours, because COLIN's predecessor, CASIS, after starting off at $600,000, was scrapped at over $7 million. I think COLIN has a lot of work to do in order to be able to fix the issues that were had.

The last example I would like to bring up is a website that the government put together at the cost of $226,000 to promote science and technology careers, which was dumped after only 12 months. Indeed, the parts of the website that would have used greater broadband speeds in terms of the latest features, including social interactivity, were not transferred to a new website. This is another example of where the government was not an exemplar when it came to promoting the uses of the National Broadband Network.