 We're here at the ITU Plenary Potentiary Conference 2014 in Busan in the Republic of Korea and I'm very pleased to be joined by Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is Minister for Communications for Australia. Minister Turnbull, thank you very much for being with us today. You're great to be with you again. Now the ITU Plenary Potentiary Conference is held every four years, it's PP14 this year. It's very much a key event in the ITU's calendar, where ITU member states decide on the future path of ITU. I wanted to ask you, what do you see as the most important outcomes of PP14? Well it's been a very productive conference, we're almost at the end of the conference of course and I'm sorry that I wasn't able to be here in the first few weeks, but parliamentary commitments in Australia precluded me being here earlier. But a great work has been done. The resolutions concerning flight tracking are going to accelerate. The ability leading into the World Radio Communications Conference next year to be able to monitor aeroplanes wherever they are in the world and of course this has been the need for this has been brought into very sharp relief by the tragic and indeed mysterious loss of MH370, lost somewhere we believe in the Indian Ocean. This Malaysian aircraft of course had a large number of Australians on it as well, so it's been a shared tragedy of Australia, Malaysia and many other nations. So you know it is remarkable that we're here in the 21st century but we're still using 1950s technology to track aeroplane movements, well that's got to change and the ITU was responded with characteristic dynamism and innovation to rise up to the challenge. I had a very good discussion about that, very issue this morning with Francois Ronsi, the head of the Radcom branch at the ITU and I'm confident to you, particularly buoyed up by his remarks that we'll see within not too many years to come a universal scheme. Obviously there's a lot of complexity regarding frequency allocation and so forth to do with that. Apart from that of course the ITU's, the Plenty Pots response to Ebola has been very encouraging, clearly there is a need for a global effort in the ITU's providing real leadership in that regard to use technology and ITT technology in particular to tackle Ebola and of course be able to monitor its spread and respond to it quickly. In Australia's view what should ITU's priorities be in the next four years? The key priority of the ITU overall is to ensure that everybody in the world has access to telecommunications, to broadband, if that to use a generic term, to very fast broadband. Of course there's a lot of housekeeping that has to be done at the ITU, you know we've been pleased to see the progress made in terms of the financial administration of the ITU and as the Minister for Australia here I've been really very proud to hear so much praise of the efforts of the Australian delegation which has its boxed well above its weight. It's not a very big delegation but Caroline Greenway of course has been particularly singled out for her chairmanship of the critical committee that's been dealing with the financial administration but you know getting own houses in order and that's critically important. And this is a very significant plenipotentiary conference, not least because it sees the retirement of Dr Toure as Secretary-General. He's been a very persuasive dynamic indeed charismatic leader and he's achieved something that not all leaders are able to achieve especially in politics which is a seamless transition to a very well qualified successor. Hulin Zhao the new Secretary-General is a gentleman with deep experience in the telecom sector and of course coming from China he is I guess signifies in bodies the growing importance of China and the world of telecommunications. I've come to know both Dr Toure and Hulin Zhao are very well and enjoyed working with Dr Toure as indeed as all the Australian delegation and we've worked with Hulin Zhao, his capacity as deputy and now look forward to his him taking on the reins as the Secretary-General. So this has been a plenipot of change but also of continuity because as I've said several times the ITU is at the very heart of humanity. Humans are in their essence social animals. The most human thing we do, the most human thing we do is to communicate, to engage. That's what love is, the greatest human virtue love is about engagement and caring for others and relating to others. And so the ITU and facilitating that communication is facilitating and enabling humans to be their better selves. When we last talked in May you described the progress of Australia's national broadband network and the Australian government's philosophy of broadband deployment. I was wondering if there have been any developments in saying? Yes, quite a few. We've completed a cost-benefit analysis of broadband in Australia which confirmed that the approach that we're taking is the best one, has a net benefit to the Australian community nine times greater than if we had persevered with the all-fibre-to-the-premises approach. Generally I would say the company is responding very well. What we've sought to do is to make this big government-owned start-up telco that we inherited from our political predecessors of previous government, we've sought to make it operate as far as it can as a commercial entity and therefore be focused on the customer, focused on the needs of the customer and not to be fixated on the technology as an ideology. So in other words, the object of the country, and this is analogous to what I was saying earlier about the ITU, the object of the country should be to ensure that everyone in Australia gets access to very fast broadband as soon as possible and at an affordable price. What technology should be used? Well, that depends on the circumstances. If you have a good legacy infrastructure like HFC that you can use to deliver very high speeds quickly with upgrades to DOCSIS 3 and beyond, then do that. There's no need to overbuild that with fibre. If you can deliver very fast speeds using VectorVDSL and avoid having to replace the last several hundred metres of copper, then do that. And so in other words, the NBN is starting to think and operate the way big telcos do elsewhere in the world, Swisscom and your hometown of Geneva or Deutsche Telekom in Germany, BT in the UK and so forth. The critical thing is not to confuse the means with the end. Technology, whether it's fixed line, whether it's HFC, whether it's VDSL, whether it's GPON, whether it's wireless, is just the means to an end. The object is that everybody should have access to very fast broadband. It is the great democratising power that we have and democratising not in a political sense. But the internet is the most remarkable invention of mankind ever. It is so pervasive, so transformative, it is changing the world and I think in some respects changing us and it's vital that everybody is able to have access to that. So we just have to focus on the outcome and then use whatever technology makes sense in a particular place at a particular time. The Australian government recently announced a review of its spectrum management framework. To conclude, I wanted to ask you what will be included in the review and what you hope the review will achieve? Well, the object is to bring spectrum management again into the 21st century. It hasn't been looked at for over a decade. We want to, the aim is to simplify spectrum licensing so there's just one class of license and also to ensure that spectrum is managed in a manner that maximises its utility. We have, again, we have so many technologies that enable us to use spectrum more efficiently for the various, in the world of video and broadcasting, of course, particularly going to MPEG 4, MPEG 5 and beyond that obviously enables you to use spectrum more efficiently, the way in which so much of our video entertainment and information and communication is transmitted over the top. I mean, I've just been here just before this interview with one of our former Prime Ministers, Goff Whitlam, very famous Australian leader, died recently at the great old age of 98 and his memorial service is being held in Sydney today and I was watching it in what appeared to me to be high definition streamed over the net on my handheld device here in Busan. So this convergence of everything on or at least towards the internet is dramatically changing the way we view spectrum and so we have to look at it in a more holistic way and ask ourselves what is the best way we can use spectrum and allocate spectrum without getting, if you like, fixated on apparatuses or apparatus licences that they will be a thing of the past. I know they've been a bit of an Australian idiosyncrasy, I've been reminded occasionally, but generally are we looking to a transition towards more and more of our telecom going over the top over IP and I think that that seems to be the inexorable trend and that obviously has implications for spectrum allocation but I'd say as a general point, regulation, legislation and regulation, administration tends to, I guess it's always going to be behind technological innovation, I don't think it's unlikely to ever be ahead but the critical thing is to make sure that your regulatory environment is as far as possible technology agnostic so that as technology evolves your regulation is broad enough to accommodate it and in so far as that isn't the case, you have to be prepared to take stock regularly and update. You know we're not talking about the laws of the Meads and the Persians, you know set down for thousands of years, we are in a dynamic environment and governments have to have to recognise that the laws that worked ten years ago even five years ago will have to change with technology. Well Minister Malcolm Tumble, thank you very much for being in the studio with us today and we very much look forward to catching up with you again. Thank you and it's wonderful to be here and I want to congratulate the ITU on the Plenipot and this very significant CES chris centenary. Thank you very much. Thank you.