Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendment be disagreed to.

The amendment made by the Senate proposes to insert a new section 98AA into the National Broadband Network Companies Act 2011. The proposed section would require the board of nbn co, within 60 days, to prepare, provide to the minister and publish on its website a report setting out nbn co's financial and deployment forecasts for the period 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2022. The minister would be required to table the report in each house of the parliament within five sitting days of receipt.

The amendment proposed is not related to the matters dealt with by the Communications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation and Other Measures) Bill 2015. That bill, as introduced, does not seek to amend the NBN Companies Act. The amendment proposed to the bill in fact is inconsistent with the underlying purpose of the Communications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation and Other Measures) Bill 2015, that underlying purpose being to streamline regulatory processes and to reduce the compliance burden faced by the broadcasting and telecommunications sectors.

For these reasons, I put to the House that it ought to disagree with the amendment proposed by the Senate.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have to ask the question: what does this government have to hide? Seriously—what does the government have to hide? What is it worried about here that it is willing to take this bill back to the House in trying to remove these provisions from the bill?

Just so that honourable members understand what we are talking about here: what the government is trying to do right now is to amend legislation so that nbn co does not have to release information that it used to release—basic, simple information, like total capex, total opex, total revenue and the amount of interest that nbn co will pay. All of this is information that nbn co used to release in corporate plans when we were in government. So this argument that the government is now using, that this is somehow commercial-in-confidence information, is arrant nonsense. It is arrant nonsense by a desperate government, willing to do whatever it takes to try to hide information about the mess they have made of the NBN.

It is evidence, again, of the hypocrisy of this Prime Minister, because when he was the shadow minister for communications he would come into this chamber on a regular basis and scold us about the lack of transparency with the NBN. I will give just a couple of examples. On 24 September 2013, Malcolm Turnbull said:

… our commitment is, our focus is, to have a much greater level of transparency and openness.

On 11 February 2014, he said:

Maximum transparency is going to be given to this project.

On the same day, he said:

The bottom line is that as far as the NBN project is concerned, the government's commitment is to be completely transparent …

On 8 April 2014, he said:

The Government requires a high degree of transparency from NBN Co in its communication with the public and Parliament.

And, as recently as this week, in a courtyard press conference the Prime Minister said:

… we believe fervently, passionately, in a transparent democracy.

But, typically of this Prime Minister, they are just words. They are not actions. It is just waffle. He says one thing and does another because, as Prime Minister, he has not been transparent with the NBN project.

Information on rollout has been taken down from the website and nbn co executives turning up to parliamentary committees are now refusing to answer even basic questions, like the value of contracts that nbn co has signed up to on behalf of taxpayers. Questions on notice are coming back with non-answers, or outright evasion to simple questions. It took a Senate order in 2014 to get the now Prime Minister to release the nbn co corporate plan, and when it was released it was threadbare and disclosed little. And now this: an attempt by the government to try to overturn this Senate amendment, to refuse access to information that was released when we were in government—despite the fact that it has been asked for by the Senate in Senate hearings and through two orders of the Senate for the production of documents in June last year and in September. On every occasion this government has refused to provide this information, and is still refusing to do it.

Why? The only reason I can think of for why the government is refusing to release information which was released by a previous government is that they do not want to reveal information about what a mess they have made of this project. I have said it before and I will say it again: they have doubled the cost of this project—

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are living in an alternative universe!

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will take the interjection. The minister doubts my comment when I say they have made a mess of this project. This Prime Minister promised that it would cost $29½ billion. Does the minister refute the allegation that it has now gone up to $56 billion? That is double the cost, and they have doubled the time it will take to build.

Everyone in Australia was told this project would be built this year. That has blown out to 2020. The cost of fibre to the node—the second-rate version of the NBN—has tripled, from $600 a premise to about $1,600 a premise. And the cost of fixing the copper to make this second-rate network work has blown out by 1,000 per cent. Even in places where they are switching it on—in the Hunter, the Central Coast and Bundaberg—when they do switch it on it is not working properly. It is a mess. So I am not surprised that the government scurries back into the House of Representatives and desperately tries to cover that up by moving amendments here to refuse access by the Australian people to basic information about the mess they have made of the NBN.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What the shadow minister has just put to the House cannot be left uncorrected. The nbn co cooperates in a transparent fashion, and considerably more transparently than it did under the previous government.

Let me remind people that every week, nbn co publishes on its website an update of the rollout numbers—how the company is performing. And it is a very good story—1.775 million premises are now able to connect to the NBN, should they choose to do so. That is after some 2½ years in government. Labor was in government for six years, and they got to barely 300,000 premises.

So the transparency is there to report on how the rollout is going, and the rollout is going well. Under the previous communications minister, now the Prime Minister, a philosophy was put in place requiring nbn co to report in essentially the same way as a listed public company. Listed public companies in the telecommunications sector and every other sector regularly provide briefings to equity analysts, journalists and other stakeholders at which the CEO and other senior executives present, and that has been the practice of nbn co—introduced when the current Prime Minister was the communications minister. Nbn co is providing regular information to its stakeholders as it should. The amendment that was moved in the Senate sought a one-time forecast out to the period 2022. I make the point that in fact detailed projections have been released out to September 2018. The company is getting on with the job of building out the network to meet those projections.

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to make a few comments. Firstly, the comparison of nbn co with a standard, publicly listed company is completely inappropriate. This is an entity that is fundamentally a government funded body that is using very substantial amounts of taxpayers' money to roll out essential infrastructure.

Mr Fletcher interjecting—

We require more information from this company because of its pivotal role in laying out the infrastructure that we need for our 21st-century economy.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a political stunt.

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not a political stunt. We actually—

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You should be grateful that we are digging you out of the unbelievable mess—

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Perth has the call.

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not accept that at all. We actually had to devise a scheme.

Mr Fletcher interjecting—

We actually had to go out there and persuade the community—

Mr Fletcher interjecting—

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order, Minister! The member for Perth has the call.

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not mind a few interjections. I am happy to have a few intelligent interjections, not just a long stream of consciousness from Turnbullistan!

You talk about transparency. We have been seeking from nbn co information about the state of the copper wire in my electorate, which previously had parts of the fibre-to-the-premises rollout that were taken off and later put back in. But now we are going to be subject to fibre to the node, the 20th-century technology rather than 21st-century technology. We know, anecdotally and from what we have seen of the copper pits when they have been opened, that we are going to have a major problem with that copper, so we ask nbn co over and over again what they can tell us about this copper wire that they are proposing to utilise. What can they tell us about its status, its standing and its reliability? They refuse to disclose any information. Either they have not got that information and have not required Telstra to hand over that information, which is completely unacceptable, or they are acting completely in the dark and are proposing to spend $56 billion rolling out infrastructure without any understanding of the nature of the copper wire over which they are proposing to deliver these services. This is a completely unacceptable situation.

The minister has been saying much about how they have got this project underway and have been able to turn it out so rapidly. Be reasonable. In six years we devised the project. We did the work to show why in fact we needed an NBN. You might recall that the Leader of the Opposition at the time actually opposed the whole notion of an NBN and that we would have a systematic rollout of 21st-century telecommunications infrastructure across the country. He actually opposed that. It did take time to get that project up and running. It did take time to begin the rollout and to develop the economic models. But then, of course, once you start rolling it out, the speed at which it would—

Honourable members interjecting—

I will leave my comments there.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the Senate's amendment be disagreed to.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the reasons for the House disagreeing to the Senate amendments and I move:

That the reasons be adopted.

Question agreed to.