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28 November 2003 - Media ReleaseSenate supports Labor’s spam improvementsThe Senate has recognised the value of Labor’s constructive improvements to the Government’s anti-spam legislation and supported the majority of our amendments the Spam Bill 2003 and the Spam (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2003. Labor’s amendments improve the anti-spam Bills by:
Labor has urged the Howard Government to respect the Senate and support this improved legislation. It is our hope that the Minister for Communications IT and the Arts will rebuff the position taken by his representative in the Senate, which is to reject the Senate’s changes, and instead accept Labor’s sensible and constructive refinements to the legislation. Media contact: Jason Ives – (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
27 November 2003 - Media ReleaseHoward Government plays politics with spamThe Howard Government has shown that it would rather play politics with the issue of spam, than take constructive measures to combat spam. By refusing to accept the amendments moved by Labor and supported by a majority of the Senate, the Government is churlishly turning its back on good legislation. Labor’s amendments have been developed following extensive consultation with a range of community and internet groups. They are the best way to ensure that spam is prohibited, without unduly infringing on the rights of Australians to communicate. Under the Government’s original legislation, an individual could face action from the Australian Communications Authority for sending a solitary commercial email to another person who they know for a fact would be interested in receiving it. Under the Government’s proposals, such an individual would be subject to the same penalty regime designed to punish spammers who send hundreds and hundreds of emails. The Howard Government has also indicated its opposition to measures that prevent the ACA from conducting a search and seizure of private property without either a warrant or the permission of the owner of that property. Labor has introduced a number of constructive amendments designed to strengthen and refine the Government’s legislation, and has always indicated its support for the legislation. The Howard Government must stop playing politics with spam and respect the Senate’s endorsement of Labor’s improvements. Media contact: Jason Ives - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
26 November 2003 - Media ReleaseSteve Waugh RetirementThe retirement of Steve Waugh from test cricket will mark the end of one the most outstanding contributions to Australian sport we have had the good fortune to witness. As a cricket player Steve Waugh’s career successes speak for themselves; the most capped player in cricketing history, second highest all time run scorer, and second on the all time list of century makers. It is not just his successes on the sporting field however that impress. Steve Waugh has supported cricket both on and off the field. As a patron for Junior Cricket in the ACT I know that there are many young players out there now who have taken up the sport due to the inspiration provided by role models like Steve Waugh. In his retirement perhaps he will have the pleasure of seeing a young player he once inspired go on to captain Australia. I wish Steve and his family all the best for the future. Contact: Kate Roffey - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 969 364
25 November 2003 - Media ReleaseAUSFTA may be final curtain call for Film IndustryThe Howard Government was quick to talk up its commitment to the Australian film and television industry in the House of Representatives today. The reality is that the Howard Government is guilty of having created a crisis in the industry after cutting more than $100 million in funding in just five years between 1996 and 2001. The Government’s cuts included $30 million from the Australian Film Commission, $10 million from the Australian Film Finance Corporation, and $60 million from the Commercial Television Production Fund. It was only in the lead-up to the 2001 election that it restored funding to levels previously allocated under the Keating Labor Government’s Creative Nation program. The Howard Government acknowledged its mistake then. This year the film industry is once again at a crisis point, with the production of Australia feature films having plunged by one-third in 2002/2003. And yet the Howard Government will not insist that Australia retains its ability to support and regulate our local film and television industry, both now and in the future under an Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA). The Howard Government must realise that making any cultural concessions would finally bring the curtain down on Australia’s film industry. Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush believes it will be the beginning of the end for our local film and television industry:
Labor calls on the Howard Government to insist upon an exclusion clause to protect Australian culture in the AUSFTA negotiations. Media contact: Adina Cirson - (02) 6277 3334 or 0418 488 295
24 November 2003 - Media ReleaseMinister must allow ATSIC and Sports Commission to work
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In contrast to the Howard Government’s policy of abandoning Australia’s ICT sector, Labor will build the ICT industry with the goal of developing small to medium ICT enterprises into robust ICT exporters. This is the only way to ensure Australians can benefit from more high-wage, high-skill jobs.
Media contact: Jason Ives - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
A third of practising Australian Artists are living in poverty, with visual artists and females the most financially disadvantaged, validating Labor’s commitment to introduce a resale royalty scheme for visual artists.
A report released this week titled Don’t Give Up Your Day Job surveyed 1063 professionals revealing that 50% of artists earn less than $7,300 from their art a year.
Only a quarter of respondents worked principally at their artistic occupation, despite almost 80 percent wanting to spend more time at their arts work.
All artists need to be able to earn a living wage to sustain their creative contribution, but in reality they are forced to work multiple jobs just to get by.
This is why Labor is drafting a Private Member’s Bill to establish a resale royalty scheme which means that visual artists will receive a direct economic benefit from their work if it is resold for a higher value.
This was a key recommendation in the Report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft inquiry (The Myer Report) which the Howard Government has still not implemented.
The contribution made by artists to our cultural and social fabric is clearly being undervalued by the Howard Government and that is why Labor’s priority is to implement a Resale Royalty Scheme.
Labor believes an Artists Resale Royalty Scheme will help, and translates to political recognition of the need to nurture and support both emerging and established artists.
Media Contact Adina Cirson 0418 488 295 or 02 6277 3334
Australian consumers are missing out on high-speed broadband services as Telstra protects its stake in Foxtel.
Telstra’s ownership of the copper network and its 50% stake in Foxtel has contributed to its decision to artificially limit the speed of ADSL “broadband” services, a Senate Committee heard today.
In a startling revelation, Dr Paul Brooks from the Australian Telecommunications Users Group described how Telstra has deliberately limited ADSL speeds to 1.5 Megabits per second (Mbps) to ensure video services could not be offered by competitors to Foxtel.
Telstra has made a commercial decision to limit the potential of broadband in Australia to protect and preserve the revenues and market share of its pay-TV interests. All Australians are losing out.
Telstra’s decision to limit the speeds of its ADSL product also applies to companies that re-sell ADSL services over Telstra’s copper phone network. Without this unnecessary limitation, ADSL could be provided over five times as fast as the existing maximum, at 8 Mbps.
This confirms the ACCC’s conclusion that Telstra is guilty of inhibiting broadband services in Australia, in an effort to protect their own profits.
This is a disgrace, and the Howard Government’s broadband competition policy negligence is allowing it to happen.
Media contact: Jason Ives – (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
The Howard Government is attempting to cover up how much it spends annually on information and communications technology (ICT).
In an effort to determine where and how much taxpayers’ money is being spent on ICT I have, over the past year, asked all Government Departments and agencies to provide detailed information about their ICT expenditure (see attached question).
However, the process was less than rewarding. Asking departments to provide relevant outsourcing information on notice is like pulling teeth. Many do not accurately record this information, and as a result, a sizeable number either took a very long time to respond, or did not provide satisfactory answers.
CSIRO and the Department of Defence refused to address the questions with any rigour whatsoever, while the Department of the Attorney General never even responded.
In what was a very disappointing response, some rough figures were obtained. Agencies and departmental responses indicate that they spent $2.67 billion on ICT, with 89.1% spent on Services, 6.6% on Hardware, and 4.3% spent on Software.
The Howard Government has done its level best to obfuscate exactly how much money the Federal Government spends each year on ICT. Typically for a Government infamous for concealing the truth, the expenditure of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money remains unaccountable and inscrutable.
This disgraceful situation must be remedied. The Howard Government must implement accurate monitoring and reporting of its ICT spend, and make these figures available to the Australian public on a twice yearly basis.
Media contact: Jason Ives – (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
The Howard Government’s ICT outsourcing industry development process is a shambles.
In Senate Estimates, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts revealed that over $160 million in Government ICT contracts are not covered by any local industry development requirements, because the existing program, the Strategic Partnership Industry Development Agreement (SPIDA), was abandoned in June 2002.
This is $160 million of Federal Government business that Australian ICT small businesses will have difficulty ever accessing, because the Howard Government didn’t feel like making these contracts available to them. Once again, no thought has been shown for local ICT industry development, and the creation of jobs for the future.
The Howard Government’s new – and vastly inadequate – industry development guidelines and reporting procedures only came into effect in June 2002, after SPIDA was ditched. This means that significant contracts signed before then have neither mandatory monitoring processes, nor industry development requirements.
As a result the following contracts have no industry development requirements or provisions for public monitoring:
 | the August 2001 “Cluster 3” contract with Optus the ($94m); |
| the October 2001 Centrelink contract with Dell ($10m); |
| the February 2002 Customs contract with Computer Associates ($29m); and |
| the April 2002 Centrelink contract with Acer ($33m). |
Furthermore, existing reporting requirements for the five “clustered” ICT outsourcing contracts, as sketchy as they are, have been late for the past two years, and will be late again this year – the third year in a row.
The Howard Government has exempted over $160 million worth of contracts from any kind of industry development requirement and reporting procedures. True to its form of resisting accountability, the Howard Government has ensured that these contracts will never face any scrutiny at all.
Media contact: Jason Ives – (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
The Howard Government has cut $35 million from the Building Additional Regional Networks (BARN) fund.
BARN was a $70 million fund that was part of the Howard Government’s response to the Besley Inquiry into Regional Telecommunications, but in a cynical exercise the Howard Government has siphoned off half of the fund to flesh out their response to the Estens inquiry into Telecommunications Services.
One of the programs to benefit from this sleight-of-hand funding trick is the Higher Bandwidth Incentive Scheme (HiBIS). However, according to evidence heard in Senate Estimates, HiBIS will inevitably advantage Telstra, as it subsidises existing broadband services rather than encouraging the creation of new, competing infrastructure, which was the goal of BARN.
Telstra has expressed interest in accessing HiBIS funds and the Howard Government has welcomed this interest.
The re-badged HiBIS funds are potentially nothing more than a taxpayer subsidy for Telstra to reduce the price of their inflated broadband services. It is rewarding Telstra for high prices and low investment in regional infrastructure.
The Howard Government keeps changing its mind about broadband, and it keeps getting it wrong. What Australia needs is a strategy to improve competition in this emerging market, not subsidies to the big players to encourage them to keep up their uncompetitive practices.
I call on the Howard Government to exclude Telstra from HiBIS funds. Taxpayers’ money should not be used to reward neglect and poor service.
Media contact: Jason Ives - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
The two-week rebate package Telstra is offering as compensation to victims of its email pain could be worth as little as $12.50 - half the monthly cost of a Telstra BigPond email account.
Telstra confirmed that at least 1.2 million BigPond customers and an additional 270,000 broadband customers were directly affected. However, this paltry amount is an insult and demonstrates Telstra’s ignorance of the damage caused by this email debacle.
Presumably, small businesses using Telstra’s “Business Internet Regular Plan” at $15.95 per month would get a mere $8 rebate. This is a drop in the ocean compared to the thousands of dollars in lost business some have endured as a result of these email problems.
Even those Australians on more expensive plans, such as Telstra BigPond’s ADSL high speed internet service, would be entitled to as little as $30.
Telstra has admitted that BigPond’s email system was unable to cope with the demands placed upon it, evidenced by their urgent decision to invest $100 million in it.
This rebate is an insult compared to the enormous inconvenience and cost BigPond users have faced in the last few weeks.
Media contact: Jason Ives - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
A Senate Estimates Committee has heard that public servants and Telstra employees crawled over rubbish tips in search of computer files which included Ministerial emails that were ‘lost’ in a major security breach earlier this year.
The computer files were never recovered and are presumed by authorities to have been thrown out after being stored in a wheelie bin at Telstra Enterprise Service premises in Bruce (ACT). As a result, Canberra’s rubbish dumps hosted search parties as the Howard Government desperately sought to recover the files.
This major security breach affected four departments including Prime Minister and Cabinet; Communications, IT and the Arts (DCITA); Industry, Tourism and Resources; and Transport and Regional Services.
The missing files are the backup computer files for the month of March 2003, the month that Australia committed troops to Iraq.
According to DCITA, the files included sent and received emails, attachments to those emails, calendar details and contact lists. It also included all emails sent between ministerial offices and departments.
Telstra Enterprise Services has confirmed that it is uncertain how the back-up files disappeared, and that it has never recovered any of them. Telstra presumed they were thrown out with the rubbish.
The only sanction by the Howard Government was a nasty letter from the Secretary of PM&C to the CEO of Telstra.
This outrageous security blunder has exposed the Howard Government’s hypocrisy over security-related issues. Highly sensitive confidential emails have gone missing without an adequate explanation, and yet Telstra doesn’t even get a slap on the wrist.
This is not the action of a Government truly concerned with the details of effectively protecting Australia’s security.
Media contact: Jason Ives - (02) 6277 3334 or 0411 237 683
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