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

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this rather concerning report. I noted that the member for Chifley said that the project confronted a few roadblocks, or a roadblock. I think the real concern here is that we are not confronting a roadblock, we are confronting a train wreck. We are confronting a train wreck because we have got a project that has not met a single target that has been set. That is of concern. They have had the opportunity to set the targets. They have not met one. By now we are supposed to be passing some 1.3 million houses. So how many houses or premises are we going to pass? We are not going to pass 1.3, we are not going to pass a million, we are not going to pass 500,000 houses. As we sit in wonder, the real question is: are we going to meet the revised, revised, revised target of 190,000 houses passed? Are we going to make it? I would suggest not.

Let us look at connections. Around about now, 511,000 houses were to be connected, in just a couple weeks. How many are we going to connect? If we are lucky, 20,000 to 25,000. This is a project that needs to connect 6,000 houses a day to meet the targets that it set for itself. This is not a target set by the opposition. This is the target set by NBN Co.—6,000 houses a day. I think you would have to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny to believe they are going to achieve that.

If it were possible for things to become worse, well, they certainly have. NBN Co. is now further behind schedule that it was at the last report. The budget has blown out more than it was as at the last report. The rollout has slowed to a crawl. We have had the problems that have been mentioned by the member for Wentworth. We have the asbestos problem which that master of illusion, Mr Quigley, said was no real problem at all; 'no real problem at all', he said back in the April hearings. 'Don't you worry about that by golly, just a little bit of asbestos, not a problem at all.' Yet somehow he expects us to believe that, despite a range of sites being on hold, we are going to somehow meet the targets that he set for himself. History will show clearly that those targets will be missed. We have an interim satellite solution that is running out of capacity. We have NBN Co. staff rushing for the exits. We have an NBN Co. board that is trying to have the CEO removed from his post.

It is a project in crisis. It is a project that is heading for disaster. If a publicly listed company was in this position it would probably be in a trading halt—although I do not know that anyone would buy shares in NBN Co., given its past history, so a trading halt would probably be a mere technicality. A publicly listed company would be being required to make certain disclosures to the Australian stock exchange to get to the real situation with regard to the company. But, unlike a publicly listed company, NBN Co. is a black box. Every piece of information concerning this project must be prised out. We have this Orwellian regime of misinformation perpetrated by the CEO, Mr Quigley. He makes sure that absolutely no information that is useful is divulged to the parliamentary committee that has responsibility for oversight of this project.

We have tens of billions of taxpayer dollars at stake, and the Australian taxpayer is not being given clear and concise information as to the true status of this project. Every time the committee asked for information about the latest disaster we were told the information was commercial in confidence or that we somehow did not need to know this information. The only risk posed by releasing much of this information to the Joint Committee on the NBN is embarrassment to the government. And it is an embarrassment.

The chair of the committee, Mr Oakeshott, the member for Lyne, seems to be saying that everything is going okay. He said just yesterday that 'the NBN remains on track to deliver a rate of return to the taxpayer of over 7 per cent per annum'. Well, we will see. The member for Lyne is in fact complicit in the regime of deceit and dishonesty that this committee has had to endure. They are actually running a protection racket—

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