Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

in reply—I want to thank the members from all sides who have spoken in this debate and just briefly sum up the issues between honourable members. The government, in pursuing the NBN, are confusing the means with the end. They have established as their goal the building of a fibre-to-the-home national network for a cost of $43 billion to 93 per cent of households. That is the means. The end is the provision of universal and affordable broadband across Australia. The task of this parliament and the government should be to determine the most cost-effective way of delivering that that will provide competition and the lowest access prices to Australian consumers, and that is exactly what our National Broadband Network Financial Transparency Bill 2010 has asked the Productivity Commission to do. The terms of reference would require the Productivity Commission to analyse the availability of broadband services across Australia, identifying those areas where services are not of a high standard, and then to look at the different options by which that can be rectified.

It is clear enough to us that that goal of universal and affordable broadband can be achieved for a tiny fraction of the $43 billion bill that the NBN will involve, but the government does not want to know that and so it has resisted this legislation and refused to have it referred to the Productivity Commission—this notwithstanding that the government’s principal economic adviser, Dr Henry, has said on many occasions that every major infrastructure project should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis and any that does not pass that test necessarily detracts from Australia’s wellbeing. And, of course, the government established Infrastructure Australia to do precisely that job of prioritising, analysing and performing a cost-benefit analysis on major infrastructure projects. So common sense dictates that this project, the biggest of them all, should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

The government members have said no. What has been their argument? They have said it will delay the rollout of the NBN. That is completely and utterly untrue. The cost-benefit analysis would proceed while the initial demonstration sites that are being rolled out now were being built. Indeed, the experience in those sites would be very useful, I have no doubt, to the Productivity Commission. The government members have said, ‘The problem with a cost-benefit analysis is that you’ve got to put in a lot of assumptions and it’s subjective.’ If that were the case, you would never do a cost-benefit analysis on anything. You would never do an economic analysis of anything that involved looking into the future, because of course you have to make subjective decisions. Indeed, the government has made subjective decisions and judgments here in the assertion which a number of government members made and which of course Senator Conroy has made many times, which is that we should build this fibre-optic network not because of what it can do today but because of the things we do not know that it may be able to do in 20 years time. That is absolutely extraordinary, indicating a complete lack of understanding of the time value of money.

The refusal to undertake a cost-benefit analysis is bad enough, but now we have, in this bill, the opportunity to require the government to publish a business plan by tomorrow. If this bill were passed by the House and the Senate, a business case would have to be published tomorrow. The business plan is there—we know it is there—but the government will not publish it. They will not release it until after the House has risen. The Prime Minister does not want to be questioned on that business plan in this place. She does not want members and senators to challenge the government or scrutinise the government’s spending on this project based on that business plan, and so it is being hidden from view.

The reality is this: any Australian with a small business who goes to his or her bank to borrow $20,000 or $50,000 for a cafe, a retail outlet or a farm has got to produce a business case. The bank manager will say: ‘Where’s your business plan? Where’s your business case?’ And they will scrutinise that and hold the would-be borrower to account.

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