Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion because we have a very important issue at stake here—that is, the accountability of public funds that are going to be provided by hardworking Australian taxpayers. It is quite interesting when you look at the scale, the width, the breadth of this project and the issue of cost benefit. Generally, when you look at the internal control measures that you would put in place to supervise and manage a project, those measures should be commensurate with the size and scale of that project. We have in this case the largest government infrastructure project in the nation’s history and yet we are going to provide that project with a far lesser level of scrutiny than that normally accorded to much smaller projects.

It is quite astounding that we would be going into this project without a proper cost-benefit analysis. It is one thing to flick and tick, to ensure through audit processes that the funds are disbursed in accordance with appropriate accounting standards and so on and so forth. But the most important thing to do in a project of this scale is to ensure that we have the expenditure proposal right, that we are getting the maximum value for money and that the technology we are investing in is going to deliver the best outcomes for the taxpayers who are providing it.

One thing that is absolutely missing from all of this is transparency. We see through all of the reports this veil of secrecy that the government wants to cloak round the NBN so that it cannot be properly scrutinised, so that the Australian people will not know that this government is driving them down a very dark road indeed—a road that is going to lead to a massive capital loss on behalf of taxpayers. It is going to lead to a massive loss in value—a loss that is made not by the Australian Labor Party but by the Australian taxpayer. It seems astounding that we would not have a cost-benefit analysis for this project. When you look at the business case you see secrecy everywhere. Only 160 pages of the 400-page NBN Co. business plan were actually released. Why is that?

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