Cameron Caldwell (Fadden, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak against this bill, the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill 2024, and in doing so I think it is worth reflecting briefly on the history of where this came from. We'll recall that a few weeks ago the Prime Minister in question time had a particularly bad afternoon. He popped into the chamber late that night, issued an apology to the people of Australia, and then promptly, the next day, absolutely out of nowhere, we found this new piece of bright, shiny legislation which is nothing more—and was nothing more at the time—than a complete distraction, a shiny bauble so that people stopped thinking about either the Prime Minister's actions or what was actually going on in their life at the time. What we ended up with is six pieces of paper that form this unbelievably unimportant piece of legislation.

I'll refer, for example, to some legislation that was introduced earlier today, just to give those viewing at home a little bit of a sense of what six pages might achieve. Earlier today we saw some legislation introduced that was 227 pages long—substantial reform. So what on earth might we or the government be trying to achieve with these six pages? I can tell you what they're trying to achieve: really, not much more than the complete distraction and smokescreen that I referred to. It doesn't do more than a front page headline for them to use, which is: National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership). There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. That's your headline. That's the distraction. What it shows is the level of desperation that this government have two weeks out from the end of the year, when there are two more sitting weeks. They are completely out of ideas on issues that are genuinely important to Australians.

I can tell you that this issue about the public ownership of the NBN is almost the furthest thing from the minds of the average Australian at the moment. I get around the electorate. I talk to people. I stand outside a supermarket or walk through the park. I can tell you that none of them are coming up to me, saying, 'Geez, I really think that we should change that piece of legislation about the potential future sale of the NBN because I'm really worried about that.' No. What they're saying is: 'I'm really worried about my grocery bill. I'm really worried about my electricity bill.' And what are we seeing from this Labor government? We're seeing not much on those issues. In fact, we know that this is really just a sneaky distraction because not even the government itself has been talking about the NBN. The Prime Minister himself last mentioned this on 3 July, and it's only been mentioned a few times in parliament this whole year.

I'll give credit to people where it's due, but I'm just thinking that there's something quite cynical about this whole thing. Part of it is in what we saw from the member for Richmond, who is one of the better performing local members out of a very bad government—I'll give her that—maybe using this time in the public domain that's streamed out to lounge rooms cross Australia and watched frivolously on various social media channels to talk about how amazing the coverage is in suburbs like Kingscliff and Newrybar. That's all fantastic, but that's not actually what this bill is about. This bill is a bill to try and amend some provisions of legislation that was brought in almost 14 years ago to the day.

The irony of this is that the distraction tactic chosen by the PM has given us as an opposition some time now to really delve into the history of the NBN. What I love more than anything in life is a dose of irony. The biggest dose of irony that I think we've found in our subsequent research is that, at a time when we all know the Prime Minister was famously the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport—and I understand he was very concerned about how aeroplanes were getting around at that time—he momentarily showed an interest in the NBN, almost 14 years ago to the day, in his second reading speech to this place on Thursday 25 November 2010. So the Prime Minister himself actually tabled the legislation, about which he says in his speech:

It also sets out arrangements for the eventual sale of the Commonwealth's stake in the company once the NBN rollout is complete, including provisions for independent and parliamentary reviews prior to any privatisation, and for the parliament to have the final say on the sale.

I'm just finding it quite curious that, 14 years later, the Prime Minister now feels it's time to go back on what he thought was a pretty good idea then, by amending these provisions with the seven pages of flimsy legislation that have been put forward. It would seem to support the fact that the whole basis of this is really nothing more than a splash of a headline. Perhaps it's a distraction, but I think it's probably something more.

We know from this period of time, if we go back to 2010, that another Labor luminary who was right in on this NBN action at the time, Senator Stephen Conroy, was going ballistic in the media, with press release after press release. The press release that was issued on 22 November 2010 has the heading 'Government committed to sale of NBN Co'. Again, I'm finding it extraordinary that the very people who are now trying to save the NBN from some fanciful sale offering are actually the ones that created the vehicle and the idea for the whole thing in the first place. Senator Conroy was very clear in what he was expecting at the time, and the Prime Minister—the then Minister for Infrastructure and Transport—was very clear when he gave his second reading speech. The press release says:

Senator Conroy said the Gillard Government remained firmly committed to selling its stake in NBN Co after the network was fully built and operational, subject to market conditions and security considerations.

He said:

The Government has always said any sale of NBN Co will be subject to a Productivity Commission inquiry before any sale takes place.

They clearly thought about this a lot because there's an entire process that's set up with what we might describe in the modern vernacular as guardrails so that this thing would go really well and maximise the public interest and the financial outcome.

It just seems extraordinary, again, that I reflect that in 2024, almost 14 years to the day after this press release, I'm standing in this same place now with this Labor government undoing the very thing that it set out to achieve. I find some of this really quite interesting, in that there were some very clear steps set out as to how any potential sale could take place. I'm going to step through those because this is not something where a third party could just run out into the world, stick it on the internet with a 'for sale' sign and sell it to the highest bidder. It's not like that. The legislation is very clear, and perhaps, to give them some credit, they thought this through. It provides about five simple steps that would need to be attended to before any sale could be completed.

Firstly, the NBN has to be complete. We know that that's the case. It was declared by the minister at the time that the NBN, for this purpose, was complete. But then steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 are, in my understanding, nowhere near happening. The first one of these incomplete steps is that the Productivity Commission would need to be requested to conduct a 12-month inquiry. The next step would be that we would then have a parliamentary joint committee to consider the Productivity Commission's 12-month inquiry report. It would then need to be declared ready for sale, and, ultimately, there would need to be a decision of both houses of the parliament for this to go ahead.

This framework has been in place, as I said, for 14 years. The framework has been the same for 14 years. Nothing's changed since the Prime Minister first walked in here in November 2010 and introduced this legislation. There has been absolutely no mention of this from the coalition. There's been no suggestion of a sale. There's been no suggestion of a change in the approach to the sale. What we've been doing as a coalition is remaining firmly focused on the things that matter to Australians, and this stunt, quite frankly, is not one of those things. Perhaps it's the ghosts of Labor governments past that they're trying to save this sale from—that somehow the then Prime Minister concocted some sort of landmine that the Prime Minister's now going to step on 14 years later.

This is all complete and utter nonsense. I think what's more likely—from having seen the Labor Party in operation over many years—is we're going to see a corflute campaign at the next election. Make no mistake, there is nothing that Labor love better than a policy that they can fit onto a corflute. I'm wondering what these corflutes are going to say. Maybe one of them will say 'Keep the NBN in public hands'. Maybe another will say 'Cheaper internet'.

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