Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I hear someone saying it in Latin to me and it being translated across the table—primum non nocere. We should not do anything that hurts people. The best way to do that is to stage it, to sequence it and to focus on those that need it most, and not regard this as something that is going to happen overnight. We cannot afford to be investing in entities or providers who cannot deliver, and we have to have the strongest assurances that they can achieve it. The first signs that I see of slippage are when those contracts go from $1.5 million to $3.2 million or $48 million to $52½ million, when individuals who are contracted to do something suddenly end up doing something else, or in the worst-case scenario in the UK they start suing the government or politicians start writing to the secretary of the NHS saying 'I warn you not to sign that contract' nine months before it ends in tears. We just do not want to go there.

I do not want to be the professor of doom, but the minister in her first few weeks in this portfolio needs to take a very strong interest in what I warn could be the next NBN. This could be a government imposed, extraordinarily expensive solution that simply leaves us where the UK is. I am not saying that we are smarter than the UK. I would like to learn from the UK. I would like to know that some lessons have been learned from an economy that devoted an enormous amount of money to this proposition. If you leave it to providers to develop this and to do it in open-source code so that everyone can contribute to the improvement of the system, that might be fine, but where we head off into proprietary systems that are fundamentally secret, that no-one has access to and that we lose completely if the company goes bust has to be a concern. I have a fear that it could well happen here in Australia.

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