James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moreton for his eloquent advocacy of the public ownership of assets, and I lament that he won't be serving in the next parliament to support legislation to provide public funds to build nuclear power generation for our national effort to secure the grid and achieve net zero by 2050—another great example of public infrastructure that we will have the opportunity to talk about investing in in the not-too-distant future. I also pick up his criticisms of the privatisation of Telstra. He ran out of time to criticise things like the privatisation of Qantas and the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, but no doubt he'll have an opportunity to reflect on the merit of those decisions by a former Labor government in other debates in this chamber before he departs.

We in the coalition are somewhat perplexed by this legislation, the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill 2024, coming before this House. There are a lot of things we could be spending our time on. There are important bills on the Notice Paper. You would assume they were a priority for a government that introduced that legislation themselves well before this legislation was hurried into the parliament yesterday as part of a mechanism of distraction from a difficult period that the Prime Minister was enduring publicly in the media. I wish we were progressing some very important legislation that we have on the Notice Paper right now. There's national security legislation and economic legislation—important things that the parliament and this House should be doing. Instead we're debating a bill to answer a question that no-one out there is asking. There is no suggestion or proposition whatsoever that the National Broadband Network will be privatised. Indeed, even the government failed to properly explain, articulate or build some kind of political strategy around why they were introducing this legislation in the way that they were.

We've seen all this before. We've seen them run very good scare campaigns. We've seen the 'Mediscare' campaign; that was a good one. They really did trick and deceive the Australian people on that one. They really did frighten unnecessarily and mislead some of the most vulnerable Australians with outright lies. The Labor Party did that in their 2016 campaign. This one's kind of bizarre because it hasn't even been set up to have any political effect whatsoever.

In fact, when I looked for any coverage in the media of the fears there might be out in the community about the privatisation of the NBN or why there was a necessity to amend this legislation, all I could find was commentary on how bizarre and weird the political strategy of the government was in bringing this bill into the parliament, because no-one understands or can make sense of what the point of this would be because, even if it was a political tactic, it's such a poor and pathetic one. It's not like they properly created the fear out there in the community or we've been reading the suggestion in the paper or watching it on the nightly news that NBN is at risk of being privatised. No-one has raised anything like that whatsoever in the public debate.

But we know that this is a tricky sitting week for the government. They're dealing with a lot of pressure and a lot of bad press—a lot of articles about their competence and the competence of the Prime Minister. We've had prime ministerial apologies in this chamber for mocking and offending people with a disability. One really does wonder about the interesting timing of this bill coming into this chamber.

For the millions of people watching at home, who might not be aware of this, it is part of the decorum of moving government legislation that the opposition is offered a briefing to properly understand the factual elements of legislation—to be taken through what the government might suggest are the merits of the legislation so that the opposition of the day might consider supporting it. The vast majority of legislation that we debate in this chamber is actually supported in a bipartisan manner, particularly in this House. We often reserve our position for Senate inquiry processes and so on. Our shadow minister received his briefing on this legislation two hours after it was introduced into the chamber. The poor old bureaucrats at the department of communications—the quickest they could move and scramble to be available to brief the opposition was after the minister's very urgent need to introduce the legislation into the chamber.

We also know—and we sometimes enjoy reflecting in a lighthearted way on our colleagues in the other place—that legislation never moves through the Senate to the same pace at which it moves through the House of Representatives. Whether legislation moves through this House in hours, days or weeks is completely irrelevant to how quickly the Senate chooses to deal with it—or not deal with it—when it comes from us to them.

There has been no articulated justification for the timing of this legislation. More importantly, there has been no articulation of the need for this legislation. The Labor government are amending their own legislation, legislation that they put through the parliament 12 or 13 years ago, when the now Prime Minister was in the Rudd cabinet. We have a situation where we have urgent amendments to 15-year-old legislation that was brought to parliament by a cabinet that the current Prime Minister was part of. If this is truly urgent, if it is a dramatic oversight, this is an equally dramatic humiliation of the Prime Minister, and one that is occurring while the Prime Minister is out of the country.

We've seen these things happen before: the Prime Minister is away and the behaviour in the parliament is all about triggering chattering and dissent amongst the ranks. Whether it's on this bizarre, weird attempt at a scare campaign or the other curious things that we've seen in the parliament this morning, the absence of the Prime Minister during a sitting week is an opportunity for those within his own party room who might not genuinely support him to cause trouble. I think there's a bit more trouble to come in this parliament today, but we wait with interest to see that transpire.

We should be addressing serious issues in the time that we have. We don't have a lot of sitting weeks left this year. We've just received the sitting calendar for next year, and we know that an election will reset a lot of that. You can look at that sitting calendar and see that this is a government that's pretty frightened to be in this building and in this parliament. This parliament might not sit again after this year, based on the way in which they have constructed the sitting schedule for next year. My point is that we don't have a lot of time left, and right now the government is saying it wants to spend this Thursday—with possibly only three more weeks to go in the third term of this parliament—talking about legislation to amend its own legislation to address a fictitious nonsense of a proposition that the NBN might need legislative change to protect it from some kind of faux rumour or claim of privatisation.

We in the coalition support the NBN. In our time in government, we were the ones that actually delivered the NBN.

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