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

Well, you do not have a lot to say in your defence, so you may as well be brief. He will say that they have a joint committee that is designed to supervise the NBN or keep an eye on the NBN. But the joint committee’s terms of reference are very different to the Public Works Committee. They do not provide for the investigation of the cost-effectiveness of the proposal. They do not provide for the committee to look at the stated purpose of the work and its suitability for the purpose. In other words, the committee is based on the assumption that the NBN is a given, that the decision has been taken and that the only role of the parliament is to get six-monthly reports about how much money has been spent, without any ability to influence or calibrate or redesign or change the way in which this project is being rolled out.

The honourable member there, the member for Chifley, is shaking his head. He has had a distinguished career in the telecommunications trade union sector. Nonetheless, he would be the first to recognise that there are billions of dollars invested in telecommunications and that it performs a great task for Australia but that every investment carries with it an opportunity cost.

This is the fundamental point: whether you are stuck in a traffic jam because there is no public transport or the roads are no good, whether you cannot get your kid into hospital because there are inadequate medical facilities, whether the schools are inadequate, whether your water supply is inadequate—all of these are legitimate claims on the public purse for infrastructure. Every dollar that is spent on the NBN that is in excess of that which is required to achieve the objective of universal, affordable broadband for all Australians—every dollar that is spent in excess of that objective—detracts, as Treasury Secretary Ken Henry said, from Australia’s welfare. That is why he has said again and again and, indeed, why the government echoed, in the days when we thought they were fair dinkum about this, that a cost-benefit analysis is required.

The Public Works Committee was established by our forebears in this parliament a century ago to supervise government investment in infrastructure and endeavour to ensure that it was not wasteful or reckless. That Public Works Committee today is being excluded from doing its duty by a government that is unaccountable, reckless and determined to spend this money regardless of whether it is needed to achieve the policy objective which we all share. The Public Works Committee must be allowed to do its job. If the Productivity Commission were doing a cost-benefit analysis, there might be an argument for not having the committee involved. But the Public Works Committee is there to do a job and it should be allowed to do it. It is only a government that is afraid of the facts, afraid of its recklessness being exposed, that would seek to exclude the committee from examining this gigantic project.

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