Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on the same matter, which is the NBN Co’s 2008-09 annual report. On the face of it, it looks like a pretty standard annual report. It refers to the Australian taxpayers’ money that NBN Co. had the pleasure of spending in the 2008-09 year. I guess for some that might be pretty standard, but what is not so standard about this annual report of NBN Co. is that at the same time it refers to spending taxpayers’ money it has delivered nil progress—nil progress on the government’s National Broadband Network.

We see here the flavour of the megabucks—the taxpayers’ dollars—being spent by this government on NBN Co. and on the NBN itself, and we have still not got one new service provided as part of Labor’s NBN. Not one new internet connection has been provided as part of Labor’s rollout of the NBN. We are spending plenty of the bucks and not delivering any of the bits. The NBN Co annual report tragically is the foretaste of things to come, because the government has hardly given us confidence that it is to be anything other than the foretaste of things to come. The government has failed and failed again to explain to the Australian people what they are going to get as part of the National Broadband Network—when they are going to get it, how they are going to get it, where they are going to get it, who is going to get wireless, who is going to get satellite, who is going to get fibre to the home and how much they are going to have to pay for the pleasure. Instead, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, says that all this will be answered by his now infamous implementation study—the network design, the rollout schedule, and how much it will cost. Where is the implementation study? He said it was due by the end of February. The end of February has come and gone; March—on the march. The minister told the parliament yesterday, ‘I have got it, I have got the implementation study, but nyaa, nyaa, nyaa, you can’t see it.’