Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, Senator Parry is right. It does not make Senator Parry feel better and it certainly does not make me feel any better. It does not make me feel any better, because it is so lacking in detail. It claims that, similar to the implementation study, the NBN business case demonstrates the project’s financial viability. That is all it says about the financial viability. That is all it says about what may or may not be in that business case. That is all the information you get. What about the assumptions? Under what assumptions does this financial viability occur? What is financial viability under this business case? Is it that they will have something that they can sell off to the value of the $43 billion that it is going to cost? In how many years time? What type of return to taxpayers will there be? None of that information is answered by this ministerial statement—none whatsoever.

It strikes me, frankly, that this ministerial statement is little more than an attempt to cover up for the fact that the Prime Minister dropped Senator Conroy in it yesterday. She dropped him in it by saying that the government would release the business plan in December. He had never put a time line on it until then. He was either keeping it up his sleeve to release as part of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2010 or he was hoping, as he told Senate estimates not that long ago, to never release the document. We do not know quite what the government’s intentions were. We know they keep changing. We know that Senator Conroy told Senate estimates the business case would not be released. We know, however, that he then said it would probably be released. Then we had the Prime Minister say yesterday that it would be released in December. We come back to the nub of the issue surrounding the business case: the government has it, this document confirms they have it, they say they will release it and the Prime Minister says they will, in fact, release it in December, and yet they will not allow this parliament, this Senate or the Australian people to see this business case before we are asked to vote on the competition and consumer safeguards legislation that mentions and involves the National Broadband Network 62-plus times—before we have to make our decisions or deliberate.

That is just not acceptable and five pages of nice words, five pages of attempts at reassurance that Senator Conroy has provided the chamber with today, will do nothing to convince us of the merits of this case unless we can see the details—the planning, the pricing, the costing and what underlies the so-called viability that they claim. Just claiming there is viability is no good to the Australian Senate or the Australian people. The government need to prove it. Claiming they have done the work is of no benefit because we have heard that before. We heard that about school halls, we heard that about Green Loans, and we heard that about pink batts and home insulation. We have heard before that they have done the work and that projects are viable. This time around we want to see the business case and we believe that, if there is $43 billion on the line, we should be seeing a decent, thorough cost-benefit analysis. There is nothing in this ministerial statement to change our minds.

Question agreed to.