Copeland Gordon: Communications Legislation Bill — First Reading 
Copeland Gordon: Communications Legislation Bill — First Reading 
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GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to take a brief call on the first reading of the Communications Legislation Bill. There are a number of things I would like to mention in particular as we debate this bill. The first is that one of the objectives in Part 2 is to clarify and update the radio spectrum management regime. 
The commentary on the bill states that a well functioning regime is critical for a number of important sectors including the communications and broadcasting sectors. That statement of course is self-evidently true if we want to keep moving New Zealand communications—telecommunications and radiocommunications—into the modern world. But I want to mention that I would like the select committee to pay careful regard to submissions that it will likely get from the community and charitable sector. 
The community and charitable sector through things like Access Radio and other arrangements at the moment has what we might call preferred status when it comes to the New Zealand radio spectrum. But of course they cover niche markets. That sector covers special-interest groups in ways that mainstream radio will not do and it would be very very keen to ensure that it retain that status in the future. United Future as a party that is very very much focused on the need to grow and expand community and charitable services in New Zealand wholeheartedly supports those objectives and we hope the select committee will take special care to ensure that the access of that sector to the radio spectrum is protected going forward. 
The other thing I would like to comment on briefly is a point that has been commented on already by Nandor Tanczos of the Green Party. I sometimes marvel in life particularly in parliamentary life at the succession of events. As members know last week on Wednesday night the announcement was made about unbundling the local loop which is something that United Future supports. We believe it is a necessary step if we are to move broadband and other high-end spectrum telecommunications and information technology into the First World. 
Over a dinner party on Thursday night we were talking about it of course and there was a person there who said he had just been in Ghana and Nigeria. He said he was amazed that the Ghanaians and Nigerians were all walking around with cellphones on their ears virtually all day. He said he found it quite amazing that in countries that experience relative poverty—in fact they are definitely part of the Third World not the First World—people find themselves able to afford to use mobile phones to that extent. 
 On Friday morning a delegation came to me as United Future’s spokesperson in this area to talk about mobile phones and the expansion of the network in New Zealand. This is the same point that Nandor Tanczos was talking about earlier. I told them what had happened the night before and they said that that was exactly right. They told me that the cost of mobile phone services in New Zealand at the moment is 10 times the cost of equivalent services in Nigeria and Ghana. I was staggered to hear that so I asked them why. They said that it is very very simple. They said that in those countries this sector is unregulated. They said that it is quite cheap for people to set up competition in mobile phone services and to keep the costs down. It is just basically that people are allowed to go there they are allowed to establish without much regulation and they are getting services going. As a result virtually everybody in Ghana and Nigeria is able to use mobile phones. 
I thought that this was a very interesting phenomenon because when we talk in New Zealand about unbundling the loop and getting people on to broadband the examples that the Prime Minister gave were Singapore and South Korea. Countries of that kind are clearly First World. I wanted to probe a bit deeper. I asked how this has come about. They said it is because of the duopoly that we run in New Zealand mobile phone services. We have just two major players. We have created enormous barriers to the entry of new technology—some of which is now simple and cheap—and we are keeping it out of our markets. They went on to tell me and this will be of interest to the Minister the Hon David Cunliffe that at the Harvard Business School the New Zealand regulation in relation to mobile phones and particularly the way we have allocated the spectrum is now a case study on how not to do it. We have made it to the Harvard Business School for all the wrong reasons. 
When I heard that I reflected on it in anticipation of this debate. I thought to myself what a phenomenal cost New Zealand has had to bear in the telecommunications and information technology area for bad regulation over a long long period of time. We go back to the days when the New Zealand Post Office had a monopoly on our telephone system. We remember that we were so delighted if we managed to get a phone connected within 6 weeks. That was the kind of environment we had. It was dreadful. We all used to save money so that we could ring a relative in England occasionally. By the time we had got through talking about the weather we would say that we had to go because it was costing a phenomenal amount of money. We then went into the sale of Telecom and left it with a monopoly on the local loop and boy has that cost us a lot of money. [ 
Interruption 
] Others will be able to pinpoint where these decisions were made but it is a tragic history is it not? 
In respect of the unbundling of the local loop I have to say I have very little sympathy for Telecom from this point of view. Some of Telecom’s competitors tell me that all they wanted from Telecom was the ability to put their high-tech devices into exchanges. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: For a market price. 
GORDON COPELAND 
: For a market price exactly right. They were prepared to pay a market price to put their devices into exchanges. Telecom said that no it had put its choice of the latest technology in its view into those telephone exchanges and it would let them share that. But even though those competitors were prepared to pay for it Telecom would not allow them to put their more expensive faster and better equipment into its exchanges. That is just one example. 
Another example that comes to mind is one that got my brother-in-law on to television. He was doing a subdivision in Nelson and asked Telecom to put in the wiring for it. Telecom did it and sent him an account for $20000 for wiring up that fairly small subdivision. He was on television because Telecom in its letter thanked him for choosing to use Telecom. What a joke. The tragic thing about that is that he paid for the wiring in that new subdivision. Guess what the people who built houses in that subdivision are doing every day? They are paying Telecom to use those wires which Telecom did not have to pay to put in. 
I sincerely think that we as a Parliament still have a long way to go in this area. Goodness gracious me if we cannot even get our costs down to the level of cost in Nigeria and Ghana then we need a big wake-up call as a country. We are holding back our economy. I am sure that every MP in this Parliament privately has already come to the conclusion that what we should be doing now is looking after the interests of our consumers—not the companies not the guys who lobby us but the people who use these technologies in New Zealand. They are the people we have to keep in mind and we just have to keep working hard to bring this about. 
I do not know how we can undo some of these regulations—I simply do not know—but we cannot logically continue as a nation to aspire to moving our economy forward and our standard of living up for the benefit of all New Zealanders while we keep paying 10 times as much for our mobile phone calls as do people in Nigeria. It is dumb it is crazy and we need to get real and do something about it quickly.