Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I hear Senator McLucas saying a lot, and no doubt she will speak after me on this. If it were her money, she would not spend $43, let alone $43 billion, unless she knew she was going to get a return for that $43 billion. It is Infrastructure Australia’s job to look at these proposals and ask questions. Is it a good proposal? Is it worth the investment? Should it take priority over hospitals? Should it take priority over roads? Should it take priority over investment in our natural resources? Infrastructure Australia are there to ask questions such as these, but were they asked to look at Australia’s biggest investment in infrastructure in decades? No, they were not. They were particularly excluded from the investigation of this major investment in infrastructure, and you can understand why. It is because this is the Labor Party’s 25th iteration, or thereabouts, of some form of policy on the NBN.

Senator Conroy has been flapping around in the dark since before the 2007 election, when was trying to get some sort of policy that he could go to an election with and offer to the Australian public. But things have changed, and we have got to this situation now where, almost sight unseen and with no cost-benefit analysis done, we are going ahead to satisfy the political egos of Senator Conroy and Ms Gillard—and I say that without wanting to be personally unkind to them—by saying that they are producing a National Broadband Network.

Everybody in Australia wants a national broadband network. We already had the rudiments of it, or more than rudiments of it—a number of companies already had the job partly done. Certainly it needed government investment—and Senator Conroy first told us that he would be able to do it for $4.7 billion. We needed a proposal, which the previous coalition government had actually put in place, to ensure that there was a national network that complemented the existing network and provided fast broadband to those parts of Australia that did not then have it. That was the coalition’s policy, and it was actually in place.

Senator Conroy became the minister, illegally cancelled the contract and then put up his proposal of $4.7 billion to assist Telstra to expand their network. He then spent $20 million on some feasibility studies, had a fight with Telstra and worked out that he could not do anything. So he cancelled that and—almost, it seems, in a fit of pique—said, ‘If we can’t get our way with Telstra and do it for $4.7 billion, we will spend $43 billion of taxpayers’ money in duplicating, and triplicating in part, a system that is already there.’ As the Auditor-General points out in several documents, there is a system now in Tasmania. Senator Conroy keeps talking about it. I think Senator Barnett mentioned it in question time today. Senator Barnett, there are, from memory, 500 connections active—