Communications minister Paul Fletcher has indicated that he will not restart the stalled spectrum reform process until he is satisfied that the proposed new regime will provide superior benefits to the system it replaces.

A new Radiocommunications Act has been some five years in the making but its progress stalled in the last parliament under former comms minister Mitch Fifield.

In an interview with CommsDay, Fletcher said that while he understands there is an “appetite” for change, he needs to be satisfied that the proposed new law delivers a “public policy prize” before he green lights it for introduction into parliament.

“I guess what I want to be satisfied of is, what are the benefits we’re going to get from the changes that are proposed? How material are the claimed deficiencies in the present regime? And is there a public policy prize for making changes,” he told CommsDay. “I certainly don’t doubt that proposition that there are opportunities to update and improve the regime. The question in my mind is how wholesale the changes need to be. But, look, I don’t have a concluded view on that yet. I’m just starting to get some of my initial briefings on it.”

Work to revamp the 1992 Radiocommunications Act first began in 2014 when then minister Malcolm Turnbull asked the department and the Australian Communications and Media Authority to undertake a review of spectrum management. The government agreed to their recommendations the following year and an exposure draft for a new act was released in May 2017. But after a consultation period elicited a substantial degree of stakeholder concern about the fine print of the proposed legislation, the process stalled in what one departmental insider described as the “Canberra version of Hollywood development hell.”

“It’s been quite a torturous process,” Fletcher acknowledged.

“Essentially, I want to be satisfying myself that the bill makes tangible improvements to the current arrangements, so that we are committed to a reform process in relation to spectrum,” he explained. “In particular, I guess, the way that spectrum is allocated, but I think it’s important to start from a premise that in the broad, we’ve got a system that has served us reasonably well.”

“I think we can have a level of confidence that people will keep coming up with applications where we can make use of spectrum for economic and social good. That really needs to be the underlying consideration. What is our process, as set out in the legislation, for allocating spectrum, and then, again, to come to a more practical or prosaic level, looking at the kinds of spectrum licenses we have now— the apparatus license, the class license, the spectrum license—is that fit for purpose? Do we need more flexibility? And if so, what might different mechanisms look like?”

Fletcher said he hadn’t decided yet whether to hold another formal review into the reforms, saying it “was too early to say. That is to be determined.”

FULL STEAM AHEAD FOR RBS: Fletcher, however, was less equivocal on the also stalled Regional Broadband Scheme legislation, which creates a $7 a month superfast broadband levy which will fund the rural loss making activities of the NBN. Legislation for this was also released in 2017 but has yet to be passed by the parliament.

“We’re intending to proceed with that,” Fletcher affirmed.

“A lot of work’s been done on that. The basic policy logic of a cross-subsidy from broadband service in metro areas to regional and remote areas, that’s a direction the government’s committed to, so yes, we will be proceeding with that. They’ll be very much continuing as we talked about.”

“The whole structure of the NBN has been underpinned by seeking to solve the policy challenge that the Universal Service Obligation in the voice world was designed to address. And in the broadband world, the way we’ve addressed it is, rather than placing a statutory obligation on an existing provider within a funding mechanism linked to that, we’ve built a taxpayer funded network.”

Fletcher also played down hopes of more changes to the Universal Service Obligation on Telstra.

“There was a fairly careful look at the USO throughout most of 2018, and there’s a number of elements of it which are locked in in terms of the contract between Telstra and the government. And a set of cash flows to Telstra. So that’s locked in for quite some years.”