Estimates Debate — Vote Communications

This is a very, very important time in Vote Communications. I want to take just a little bit of the Committee’s time this afternoon to explain exactly what the Government is doing. This is a very, very busy area, and the Government is making significant investment alongside significant industry investment in the development of New Zealand’s telecommunications infrastructure.

I would like to take the opportunity to record today that one of the aspirants for international bandwidth, Pacific Fibre, has taken another step forward today in terms of securing an international partner, and I congratulate the company on doing that. That is what it is all about. It is a combination of private industry investment and also Government investment to speed up the development of our telecommunications infrastructure. It is all part of the Government’s growth plan to get New Zealand growing faster.

The big one, of course, is the ultra-fast broadband initiative. We have now fine-tuned the request for proposal on feedback from the bidders, and that request for proposal has gone out. The bidders are now putting their very best feet forward in terms of making their final bids to participate in this programme. It is a very exciting programme, and we are expecting recommendations from Crown Fibre Holdings later on in this calendar year. I remind the Committee of the objectives. It will take 10 years to complete this very big project. The first 6 years will focus on core areas like education, health, businesses, and the first tranche of homes.

Complementing the ultra-fast broadband initiative is the rural initiative, which we developed earlier this year. That is a big one, as well. It is worth $300 million. It is made up of $48 million of a direct appropriation, plus a telecommunications service obligation reform to create a telecommunications development levy of another quarter of a billion dollars. That is to subsidise, if you like, the development of some of the rural telecommunications infrastructure. The thing that sticks in my mind is the fact that roughly half of our rural areas have dial-up broadband. We cannot have that continue, so there have been expressions of interest, and a very high level of interest in those opportunities shown by private firms, to partner the Government to improve that infrastructure. Again, we are expecting further progress in the second half of this year as we get ready to select the final partners for that project.

On the demand side, we have a number of activities going on, not least in the education area. There is a lot of work in trials of a national education network. We are also “snupping” the schools. School network upgrades are under way, and at the end of June the Minister of Education and I announced another 239 schools that will be “snupped” over the next little while as they have their school networks upgraded. That is very important, as well, because the education sector is a big part of the demand side, from the Government area, for broadband.

There is also the health area, and I am pleased that the health information technology board members, whom I have met, are really grappling with the opportunities that they are presented with in health. Wider Government initiatives in other Government information and communications technology are being coordinated through the Government ministerial information and communications technology group, which is putting together projects to encourage the better delivery of Government services through the online space, particularly as broadband continues to develop.

We have a number of complementary initiatives under way in the roll-out of infrastructure space. We are encouraging councils to work alongside the bidders for both ultra-fast broadband and rural projects to make their infrastructure available, and to encourage the bidders to do the work in their areas first. There are also some very, very good trials of innovative techniques happening, such as shallow trenching and other ways of rolling out fibre broadband around the country.

I would like to touch on a couple of issues in the policy area. We have a lot of policy development work going on in the communications space. A big one, and an important one, is international roaming and in particular data roaming between here and Australia. We have been working closely with the Australian Government and we have released a document in which we sought feedback on the status of international roaming, particularly between New Zealand and Australia. We have had the submissions in, we are evaluating those submissions, and we are looking for ways in which to bring those costs down, again to facilitate the development of a close economic relationship with the Australians, and they are very enthusiastic about doing that as well.

There are also other areas. One that I will not go into in great depth is the issue of mobile terminations, as I have to make a decision in the next little while in that regard. But the Government is very active across a range of spaces—and the digital switch-over is still to come—in order to develop New Zealand’s telecommunications infrastructure for the 21st century. Thank you.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Transport