Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is a live tender process, Senator Boswell. At the moment people are spending money in the commercial sector. They are spending money today. They have lodged $5 million bonds. They have already done it. We are in the middle of the process. It is of critical importance in the process the government has established that integrity and confidentiality are maintained. To best demonstrate their ability to meet the government’s objectives, proponents will necessarily be required to put forward significant amounts of highly sensitive commercial information, and that is what you are interfering with. The opposition motion raises the risk that proponents will feel constrained in the information they provide as part of the commercial process being run by the government. If proponents are concerned that sensitive information will be made public through a Senate inquiry, there is a high risk they will feel constrained in presenting their most innovative proposals. This is why this is just economic vandalism and sabotage. If proponents cannot be confident that the government is able to preserve confidentiality, they may limit the extent to which they bring forward detailed proposals and thus again undermine the process.

But that is actually what you are about. You are not interested in an inquiry. You are inquiring into something that has not happened yet. You are actually attempting to continue the broadband sabotage you have been engaged in for the last 11½ years. If the proposals are light on sensitive detail, the task of evaluating the proposals becomes more difficult. It should be self-evident to all senators, given the NBN process established by the government has not yet run its course or made any decisions. You are investigating decisions that have not been made. It is impossible to hold an inquiry into decisions that have not been made, but do not let that worry you. There is no national broadband network at this stage, and until competing proposals have been lodged, considered and evaluated by the expert panel, responses to most of the issues raised by the opposition’s motion will be limited in value.

We note the intention to seek submissions from government agencies and officials. The NBN process is still afoot and involves highly sensitive commercial information. Requiring government officials to discuss the conduct of a process in this environment could be detrimental to the process itself. But you know that; that is exactly why you are going to try and do it. Further, many non-government individuals involved in the process have given confidentiality undertakings. The inquiry could put them in an extremely difficult position if they feel compelled to discuss aspects of the commercial process underway. But again, do you care? No. You do not care about delivering broadband to Australians. You just engaged in a last desperate Senate majority power grab. Forty-two per cent of people in Perth—do you know what that means? That means 58 per cent of people in Perth never got broadband under you. Fifty-eight per cent of people in Perth got nothing from you.

The proposed terms of reference indicate that the select committee would inquire and report on the government’s proposal to partner the private sector to provide a high-speed national broadband network. This will include the need for government intervention in the broadband model. We do not need a detailed investigation into hypothetical barriers concocted by the opposition. But you are once again demonstrating why you lost the last election. You just think this is fun. You just think: ‘Hey, we’ve got the numbers. It doesn’t matter. We can abuse them.’ Senator Joyce, to his credit, occasionally tried to pull the former government back to reality by saying, ‘Guys, just because we’ve got the numbers—perhaps we should think about this.’ To be fair to Senator Joyce, he did attempt on a number of occasions to spell out to you the dangers of abusing the powers of the Senate, and what did he get for it? His own party is going to be wiped out. He is going to be voting himself out of existence.

So let us be clear. The critical issue is the lack of investment in national infrastructure that can deliver high-speed quality broadband services resulting from 11 long years of coalition inaction. Forty-two per cent, 32 per cent, 33 per cent: those figures should be hung round your neck, and you should be hanging your heads in shame. The stunt is nothing more than economic vandalism.