Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We are listening to both sides of this debate and there is no doubt that the NBN legislation, when it comes, will be predicated on a motion from the Senate requiring information—not all of which the government has furnished to the Senate. The progress of the legislation, which this motion clears the way for, is not guaranteed by this motion passing—if it were to—tonight. The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is not here, which I think is not a good situation. It would help if the minister were able to reiterate the government’s concession in terms of providing information to the Senate, but it does raise the question of commercial in confidence.

Mr Acting Deputy Speaker, you will know that the current opposition when in government was never inclined to be forthcoming with information of this sort—not ever. As soon as it was in the commercial interest to keep something under cover, it was not available. Here we now have the Labor government doing the same thing and the opposition is cavilling about that. There needs to be an in camera process for senators and staff to be able to look at commercial-in-confidence information when it is important for deliberations on processes, such as those we are engaged in here, which are important for the whole nation.

In all of my parliamentary life one bane that has been consistent is governments of both persuasions resorting to commercial-in-confidence excuses for blocking from going to parliament information that is required for proper decisions to be made. The coalition cannot escape responsibility for being part of that block. When it comes to freedom of information legislation and indeed to questions on notice to parliament one of the most frequent guises for not supplying information, one of the greatest excuses by ministers for not giving information, is that it is commercial in confidence. One knows there is a reasonable limit in which secrecy of, for example, patents and sometimes resource bases are necessarily critical to a company’s wellbeing, but that is very often not the case when it comes to commercial-in-confidence matters. It is simply that the private sector does not want to have the same scrutiny that they expect of the public sector.

Freedom of information ought to have been legislated long ago for the private sector as well as for the public sector because the private sector—as we have just witnessed from the global financial crisis and the need to put its way billions of dollars from the public sector as with the stimulus packages, which are getting up towards $100 billion of taxpayers’ money—is very, very dependent upon the largesse of taxpayers. It cannot resort to secrecy then when taxpayers’ representatives in the form of senators want to look at information which is critical to making decisions. The government has released some information but it has not released a great wad of other information on the basis of commercial-in-confidence reasons and it puts us in an impossible position. We do not want to hold up legislation that is essential to the delivery of good telecommunications to this nation. On the other hand, we do not want to have to debate issues where we do not have basic information that is fundamental to that decision making.

As advocates of full and open disclosure at least to the people making the decisions, we do not find the commercial-in-confidence excuse washes. I think the government should look at that again. The minister is absent from the chamber at the moment—I am sorry; he has come into the chamber and he is involved in discussions. We are in a really difficult position here. The Senate has made an order for the delivery of documents. Those documents relate to the National Broadband Network, not specifically to the legislation the government wants to bring on now. Yet we ought to have that information by now. We will continue to look at the merits of both sides and we will make our decision, if not before, when the bells ring.

Debate (on motion by Senator Xenophon) adjourned.