Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This report by the Auditor-General is a response to a request I made to the Auditor-General in my former capacity as the shadow minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy. I asked the Auditor-General to investigate and report on the NBN request for proposals process engaged in by this government to give effect to the policy it took to the last election, a process that ended in dismal failure. At the outset of my remarks, I want to commend the Auditor-General on what is a very detailed, professional and thorough analysis of this whole process. It does, I think, great credit to the Auditor-General and the independence of that body.

But I have to say to this chamber that the Auditor-General has exposed a complete and utter fiasco in the tender process that was engaged in. Frankly, the whole report by the Auditor-General is an indictment of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy. Minister Conroy must take the blame for what occurred. It does expose what was an extraordinary, outrageous and, frankly, incredibly expensive debacle on the part of Minister Conroy. As the report notes, this was at a cost in excess of $30 million to the government, and proponents, to produce absolutely nothing. The costs of the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy alone were some $17 million in relation to this failed fiasco of a process. The Auditor-General’s report is full of criticisms of this process from go to whoa, a process for which Minister Conroy was responsible. I will quote one section from page 14 of the summary document. The Auditor-General says:

In reviewing the process employed, and in light of the outcome, there are a number of observations that can be made. Early in the process, most NBN stakeholders considered that a two-stage process to select proponents for the NBN would have improved the prospects of a successful outcome and may have reduced proponents costs, rather than the one-stage process used.

Secondly, the report said that requesting proponents to outline their preferred regulatory outline for the NBN was ‘unusual’—which, of course, in classic Auditor-General’s language, is a gross understatement—for an RFP process and made a complex transaction considerably more complicated. Thirdly, and most significantly, the report said that a non-Telstra proposal was unlikely to build and operate a commercially viable NBN in circumstances where the proponent was responsible for the risk of paying compensation to Telstra. That really is the guts of the Auditor-General’s report. It is why this thing was doomed from the outset and it is why we ended up with the fiasco that we had.

I would also draw the chamber’s attention in particular to the fact that the report notes that as early as August 2008, some eight months before this whole fiasco was terminated, the department started considering NBN options outside the RFP process because the process was failing. This was eight months before the process was finally terminated. This is where the minister is particularly indictable, because he kept saying throughout this process that everything was on track, that they still expected to sign a contract and that everything was sweet in the paddock. On Wednesday, 3 February 2009, some six months after the Auditor-General noted that doubts were being expressed within the department—and clearly the department had been making these doubts known to the minister—I asked Senator Conroy in question time whether his ambition was to sign a contract in March. He replied:

I have already answered that question, Mr President. I said our ambition was to sign by March.

He was still at that stage, six months later, saying that the government was confident of signing a contract in March, the following month, and yet he knew from his own department some six months beforehand that this whole process was completely failing. Frankly, he is guilty of misleading this chamber, misleading the industry and misleading the Australian people about this whole process.

The most significant thing about this report—and it is the thing that we in the opposition kept saying throughout this process—is that it exposes the fundamental flaw in this process that only Telstra could implement Labor’s election promise to build a fibre-to-the-node NBN. The reason we kept saying that and the reason this process was flawed is that Labor stole this policy from Telstra. This was the policy, the proposal, that Telstra brought to our government. We know it very well—I know it very well. I sat opposite the table from Telstra when they put this proposal to us. All that Labor did was take that Telstra policy, put a Labor heading on it and present it to the Australian people as their policy.