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

after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get—what was it, Senator Lundy? —seven legal opinions, they had to exclude Telstra from the process. From that point on the whole process was doomed—it was dead in the water. What we see here is an inexperienced, naive minister who was led into naively constructing a process that was so inflexible and rigid, a straitjacket, that despite all he was saying to companies—Telstra itself has reported to me that Minister Conroy kept saying to them, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a very flexible process’—Telstra’s submission, for the sake of a small business plan, was to be excluded from a process which only it could build.

As a result of this complete fiasco, what do we have? The government and the proponents lost over $30 million, half of which at least was taxpayers’ money. The government wasted 18 months on this debacle, and as a result of all this the worst thing is that the government had nowhere to go but to lock the nation into this $43 billion potential disaster that we now have. It is like the old cliche: when you are in a hole dig deeper. That is what this government has done. Having its $4.7 billion proposal sink like a stone because of this fiasco, it has dug us into a $43 billion hole. The sad reality is that the original Labor policy taken from Telstra was in my view, and I have said this before publicly, the way Australia should have gone. The sensible thing for Australia to be doing is to upgrade the existing Telstra network to fibre to the node for an affordable and sensible costing, with government support, of around $4½ billion to $5 billion. We have lost all that because of this fiasco. We are now locked into the creation of a new government business enterprise called NBN Co. which is going to be given and to borrow up to $43 billion to roll out a network that many are increasingly seeing as one of the great white elephants that Australia has ever been involved in. This report, on which I congratulate the Auditor-General, is an indictment of Senator Conroy in particular and he ought to hang his head in shame.