In an interview with ABC radio on Thursday 7 August, Dr Phil Burgess, Telstra's GMD Public Policy & Communications, warned that continued delay on rolling out the National Broadband Network was having a significant negative impact on Australia.

He said that the nation cannot afford to have this vital network tied up in bureaucratic processes any longer.

"We find ourselves – all the bidders – in Heath Robinson land. What we need to be doing is digging holes, laying cable, connecting people so they can enjoy the benefits and the economy can benefit from the stimulus and job creation." 'Dr Phil' said.

Read the full transcript:

7 August 2008

Question: When are you providing information requested by the Government?

Phil Burgess: We have already provided it. The last batch was delivered last night. The problem is the Government keeps asking for more information – not just of Telstra but from other providers that have network elements. So, yes, we responded positively to the request for information. Whether this will be the last request or not, we don’t know.

We thought this whole process would be finished by June, we thought the FTTN decision would be made by June 2008. That is what we were led to believe by some of the early indications from the new Government. But that’s not happening.

They keep asking for more information, more information, more information. So we and other telcos keep providing it. At some point they’ve got to start deciding and quit studying.

The real problem we have now is a Government that is getting wrapped around the axle on process, on enquiries, on studies, on panels – on all the kinds of things that don’t have a lot to do with getting the job done.

We find ourselves – all the bidders – in Heath Robinson land. What we need to be doing is digging holes, laying cable, connecting people so they can enjoy the benefits and the economy can benefit from the stimulus and job creation that will come from building the national broadband network to 98% of the people in this country.

Question: Why do they keep asking for more information?

Phil Burgess: These are simply delaying tactics. The request for more information is a way for those who have to make the decision to avoid decisions and it’s a way for our competitors to continue to enjoy the very favourable conditions laid down by the ACCC by Graham Samuel and the regulators. They now get below-cost pricing from Telstra and they want to keep that as long as possible.

Several competitors – led by Optus – want to prevent the national broadband network from being built for as long as possible. They want Australians to keep using buggy whips when we need to be moving towards more advanced forms of transportation. But as long as the government keeps bowing to their demands for more information instead of making a decision Australia will be caught in the buggy whip era.

Question: When do you think you will get a decision from the Government?

Phil Burgess: I have no idea. We have given up trying to guess what the timelines are going to be. A process was laid out but the deadlines keep slipping, the request for information keeps expanding so it’s anybody’s guess when the process will end.

In the meantime we are running our business, getting world-leading results, increasing our investment in wireless broadband, and finding other places to invest…as shown by our recent investments in China. This process stuff could go on for two or three more years, who knows.

The latest estimate of decision time is September of 2009. That is a year and a half since the election of the new Government. As I said, the bureaucrats have this thing wrapped around the axle in a never-ending process of inquiries and studies – so who knows when it will end?

One of the jobs of a government is to make decisions, and decisions are always made under conditions of uncertainty. You never have certainty. People have to take risks when they make decisions – public policy makers do and corporate leaders do. That’s why business decision-makers want a return on investment. That’s also why public leaders try to delay or avoid decisions.

The reason why you let the private sector make investments is because some investments won’t work. If you don’t want tax payers money used for investments that won’t work and if you don’t want to take risks, then turn to the private sector.

We think this investment, under the right conditions, is a good thing for Telstra, the industry, the consumer and businesses in Australia. We may be wrong and if we are wrong we lose our money. That’s what risk is all about. If we are right, then everyone will benefit. That’s why we say, let’s get on with it instead of studying it.

Question: What’s the problem – why is moving ahead a problem?

Phil Burgess: I don’t know what the problem is. The problem existed in the last government even worse than this one. The current government has a lot of positives: They have a Minister who understands telecommunications; they have a commitment to nation-building; they see telecommunications as a essential feature of their nation-building commitment, so we can have more jobs and growth and economic development.

Investment in nation-building is really important now because we have slowing consumer demand, skyrocketing petrol prices, rising food prices, job losses (more than 19,000 in May), a decline in household wealth, a troubled global outlook.

So this is a time when really we ought to be investing in initiatives in Australia that can have a positive stimulating impact on the job creation and the economic environment – and the NBN is one of them.

The national broadband plan is also important because getting to work on it, starting the build, will create jobs and eventually increase productivity. The Prime Minister –Kevin Rudd – said in March of this year that our productivity has dropped from 3.3% labour productivity growth in 1998 to 1.1% last year…and that has to be reversed. If it isn’t reversed, if our productivity continues to sink, our per capita wealth will go down, our ability to compete in international markets will go down.

Bottom line: Everything that today should be down (like inflation and mortgage rates) is up and everything that should be up, like growth and job creation, is down, so we need to do things here that will reverse that.

In the case of the national broadband plan we have a private company called Telstra that is willing to invest almost $5.0 billion of its own money to stimulate the economy, to create, we estimate more then 16,000 new jobs to bring between $100 million and $350 million dollars a month of new wealth into the economy once the new FTTN network is built. Yet people are sitting on their hands as they are wrapped around the axle of process. This really needs to be re-examined.

There is another factor here. And that is who is qualified to build this? If you go out to buy a house or a car you have to make a down payment, you have to prove that you are able to pay for the home or car. The only requirement or qualification to bid for the national broadband network was a $5.0 million bond.

Now a bond of $5.0 million for a $10.0 billion bid is one-fourth of one percent. That would be like going out to buy a $24,000 car and paying $12 down. Give me a break! People don’t do business that way. It would be like going out to buy a half a million dollar home and paying $200 down. Now that’s not the way the world works.

I think legitimate questions can be raised about whether Terria, which has a net worth of $12 – that is 1,200 cents! – can deliver $5.0 billion for their half of the deal. Can Optus come up with the money to do this? There are no signs they can. It’s our view that their behaviour today shows that what they really want to do is to stall a decision – and, so far, they are succeeding because they don’t have the resources to pump into this $5.0 billion dollar project if they win – which is at least a $10 billion dollar project overall.

Question: What should be done about the process?

Phil Burgess: Ah, I wish I could tell you. But we are not allowed to comment on specific things that the process is about, specific deadlines and so on. Every deadline we’ve had so far has slipped and it has slipped again. This is serious business. We need to get on with the job.

And by the way, while we are talking about serious business, can our major competitors like Optus and the so called Terria group put up the money that’s required to do this. Remember the movie Jerry McGuire and ‘show me the money’?… I mean show us the money!

Demonstrating your ability to pay, your ability to perform is something that everybody in business and everyday life is asked to do.

The second thing is, look at Optus, Optus builds networks but they build them on the cheap. The networks they build are cheap and cheerful. But…they don’t work, they collapse.

Optus customers have had three major problems in the Optus network in the last ten or twelve days or so. One of those was a cut. Every Telco has cuts; we have cuts in our lines. The issue isn’t when you have somebody plough into your lines and cut somebody off. The question is recovery. They took a long time to recover. They take days to recover; we take hours to recover – and that’s because we’ve built networks with redundancy and engineering that provides carrier grade services.

Look at the last several days…they had their 3G wireless network go down twice. Why is this happening? They say it’s about the software but I’ve talked to engineers about these issues and I’m told that Optus is most likely to be suffering from congestion. They build networks on the cheap and now they are paying a high price…and their customers are suffering inconvenience and costly outages because their networks can’t carry the traffic – like bandwidth-hungry iPhone traffic and other services they are providing on demand.

Question: Some say you are not forthcoming with information. Is that true?

Phil Burgess: No, we have been fully frank and forthcoming. We have no problem at all in providing the information they have been asking for. The point is why do they need the information. Look, Optus already made a proposal to build a National Broadband Network when they called themselves the G9…about 12 months ago. They had enough information to make an undertaking to the ACCC that they would build a National Broadband network if they were given the nod to do it. If they had enough information a year ago to make a solemn undertaking to the regulator bid, why are they now asking for more information? Let me give you a hint: They are asking for more information because they see that this Government is committed to building a National Broadband Network and what they are trying to do is to delay this decision for as long as they can.

Ok thank you.