Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

What we can say based on the Hansard of what he said in this parliament in February, that the process is successful and will be successful, is that it has been confirmed today that he misled the Senate. Senator Conroy should come in here and apologise to the Senate. He should say sorry to the Australian taxpayers for the $30 million that has gone down the tube and specifically for misleading the Senate.

In this National Broadband Network process, the $30 million was over an 18-month period. In terms of the costs, that is simply disgraceful. The report talks about the costs and the possibility that, if the process continued, there would be a potential payment of just terms compensation to Telstra for the compulsory acquisition of the right to use its assets, should a non-Telstra proposal be successful. That is set out in the report at page 18. So it was flawed from the beginning, and we know that billions of dollars may have been required to be paid to Telstra as a result. The process was flawed from the beginning, yet it was not canned until 18 months later, in April last year. We know that much.

What else do we know? We know that the government have a history of waste and mismanagement—this comes on the back of GROCERYchoice, Fuelwatch and the schools stimulus debacle in terms of the blow-out in spending. We know that they have spent $1 billion—in fact, it would be in excess of $1 billion now in their more than two years in government—on consultants, when they said they would be cutting consultant expenditure by hundreds of millions of dollars over those years. So the waste and mismanagement is shocking. But today what has been revealed, thanks to the questions from Senator Minchin, is that Senator Conroy has been unable to answer questions put to him in the Senate. It is a great shame. He should hang his head in shame and apologise to the Senate for misleading the Senate and for the gross waste of taxpayers’ money.