Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Adams, thank you very much, as one who also comes from rural WA and spends a lot of the time there—that it is an absolute disgrace how short a distance one travels out of major centres, cities and towns in our state before one finds that there is no phone coverage of any sort at all. Talk about, as Senator Williams was earlier, some of the problems of the past! I think it would be very nice to be able to communicate in any way at all. It is great from a convenience point of view! When it comes to emergencies such as fires and floods and other sorts of emergencies, we rely on telecommunications to activate volunteers, and so we come to yet another problem.

But I will return to the business plan. After having looked at the vision and having dealt with objectives and what the targets might be, I think the next phase of the plan is to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. Regrettably, this government has decided that it does not need cost-benefit analyses. I will quote from an article written last year:

The most rational person in the government, finance minister Lindsay Tanner, says that there’s no point doing any cost-benefit analysis. We’ll just spend the money and we know ... they will come.

Presumably ‘they’ are customers in the future. So that was apparently the value of the cost-benefit analysis, or to further summarise:

In short, we are mounting a $43 billion assault on, and confiscating the assets of, Telstra for being a monopoly bloodsucker.

To replace it either with a sharing-caring, inevitably hopelessly inefficient government monopoly bloodsucker. Or a shared government-private bloodsucker.

Either which way having to suck much more blood to pay for the extra $43 billion.

In a properly structured organisation and a properly developed business plan, what do we get out of a cost-benefit analysis? The first thing we start to do is have a look at what revenues we might expect, but we cannot get any figures out of the government as to what they see the revenues will be. The second thing we look at in our modelling are alternatives and options for expenditures. Only then do we learn that this marvellous plan is being rolled out to the most magnificent places. I was delighted to hear the other day that Midway Point in Tasmania is one of the three targets, which is fantastic. I remember travelling through Midway Point often when I lived in Tasmania, and you did not have to spend long doing it. So I hope they are not expending too much money on Midway Point as one of the trial sites. When you come back to the question of expenditure, you learn that in fact the costings for this enormous rollout of wired technology have apparently not included connections to households. Therefore, we do not know yet what it will cost households to actually link into this technology. We heard from Senator Williams earlier. He quite rightly said that for every one or 10 or a thousand residents who do not link up to it, it is only going to cost the others more.

Interestingly enough—and if the minister were here he could get this one down—within a cost-benefit analysis a very important milestone is a thing called GMROII, gross margin return on inventory investment. That is the very thing that drives retail business day to day, the very matter that drives your intention in terms of how much you will invest in inventory, and unfortunately we cannot get any sort of figures because, in the words of Minister Tanner, a cost-benefit analysis is a complete and utter waste of time. Therefore, I simply ask this question from a cost-benefit analysis point of view: how can anybody on this side be asked to vote, to consider or to look at anything associated with this legislation if the most basic building blocks are not being delivered to us?

In our business plan we come next to competition, and what an amazing thing it is. But at this point in time I must seek leave to continue my remarks as I understand there is some administrative business to be completed before we go to adjournment. So I will act on your direction, Madam Acting Deputy President, as to whether I can get started on competition or we revert to administrative business.