Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I will get to that, Senator Ronaldson—I will take your interjection in a little while. NBN Co. Ltd is going to be spending $43 billion, not of Kevin Rudd’s money—although I believe he is wealthy enough probably to pay for it himself—but of taxpayers’ money. A CEO has been appointed and we know he is a very qualified man; he is on a very big salary. He is being paid at the moment although the company has not started operations. Why has it not started operations? Because no cost-benefit analysis was ever done and the government and NBN Co. Ltd are waiting for the implementation report before they can start work. Anyone with a modicum of business sense would have thought that you would do a cost-benefit analysis before starting the company and before starting employing staff at a salary of $1 million-plus. Wouldn’t you think that was important?

If you are not going to do a cost-benefit analysis perhaps you would do an implementation study and that is what the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Conroy—bless his little soul—in his very infinite wisdom has decided to do. Even though the implementation study may say the whole idea is ridiculous, it will not work and it is uneconomic, we do not actually know what it will say to say. Well, I suspect Senator Conroy might have an idea although it is supposedly an independent study, but we do not know how we are going to implement this $43 billion spending of taxpayers’ money because the report has not come out. But we are already employing the CEO, a very qualified man probably worth every penny of the upwards of $1 million we are paying him.

The other day I noticed that a bloke named Mr Mike Kaiser has been appointed as government relations officer—and this answers your question, Senator Ronaldson. Mike Kaiser, a very clever little fellow—so clever that he had to resign from the Queensland parliament. He was a Labor member of the Queensland parliament, has been around the higher echelons of the Queensland Labor Party for many years and is thought to be the architect of their electoral success—so why did he have to resign from the Queensland parliament? I will tell you, Senator Ronaldson. It was suggested—I do not make these accusations; I only repeat what I see in the papers—that he might have been involved in some electoral fraud.