Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

This is really about transparency. As Prime Minister Gillard said when her government was recently installed: ‘Let the sunshine in, let’s have transparency, let’s open the gates, let’s have visibility of what is going on. We’re prepared to let the sunshine in.’ Well, here we are merely seeking information so that we can share it with the Australian community, and what are the government doing? They are obviously not interested in letting the sunshine in at all. They are trying to hide things. They want to put this report through some internal processes so they can hide the information in it. You can almost bet that the process they are going through right now is about taking out any information that would allow anybody outside the government to do a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN. They have an implementation report and, under the guise of ‘commercial in confidence’, they will hide anything that gives anyone else the capacity to properly scrutinise this project. They do not want the opposition or the Australian people to have access to that information.

And it is not as if their record is all that flash. Over their first term of government there were some pretty good examples of their complete failure and incapacity to manage projects properly. You do not have to go much further than the BER. We had the famous example of covered outdoor learning areas which a few years ago could have been built for $125,000 costing $500,000 or, in some cases, close to $1 million. When we are talking about cost-benefit analyses, I would suggest that there was not all that much value for money for the Australian taxpayer in those particular projects. Even in that process there was continual denial that there was any failure, that there was anything wrong. In fact, I think it was Minister Tanner who at the time said they were in such a hurry to get the money out the door that they did not have time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s; it was just a matter of getting the money out the door. We had the absurd situation of taxpayers’ money being spent at that sort of rate but we did not get value for money. So I think the opposition has every right, on behalf of the Australian taxpayer, to ask for the information that the government have available to them and insist that the government do the work that rightly should be done. As the government say, it is the biggest infrastructure project in the Australia’s history, yet they do not want to do the base work that should be done to support it.

I can give more examples. Take pink batts: we spent billions on the installation of pink batts, and now we are going to spend close to $1 billion to repair the problem that was created by pink batts—a complete, unmitigated disaster. Then we can go on to the Green Loans Program. Was there a green loan ever issued? That is a good question! We have a lot of assessors for green loans out there who had their hopes raised about a potential business for themselves. They went out and got trained. They incurred expenses. I do not think we have actually had a green loan issued. Then of course there was GroceryWatch. Who could forget GroceryWatch? The government would like to, I am pretty sure—and Fuelwatch, likewise. They would like to see the back of Fuelwatch.

Then there is the CPRS. We had comments from government senators a minute ago about manipulation of inputs into processes. Well, if there was ever something where the inputs were manipulated, it was some of the work that was done on the CPRS. We were told faithfully by the government that the CPRS was going to be revenue neutral. We were not told for a long time—until we finally discovered it—that that was not an output of the model; it was one of the inputs to the model. So what reason do we have to trust the government when they say, ‘Everything will be fine with this project.’ What reason do we have to trust this government? We do not have any.

Then we come to the NBN in Tasmania. The government tells us that it has been completed ahead of schedule—maybe it has been completed ahead of schedule—but also that it has been completed under budget. The figure that we have been given for completion under budget is 10 per cent. But how would we know? We are not told what the budgets are—minor detail! We were told, ‘Trust us; it was completed 10 per cent under budget,’ but they would not give us the budget figures. We have been told: the cost for the first stage—for the three towns that it has been rolled out to so far: Smithton, Scottsdale and Midway Point—plus the backbone work, has been about $30 million. We cannot be given a break-up of that.

Senator Conroy’s excuse for not being able to give us either budgets or a breakdown of that cost is: ‘We would be signalling to potential tenderers the figures that we have in mind for the individual parts of the project.’ That is his excuse—and it is just an excuse, because, in so many other ways and in so many other projects, governments put out indicative costs for projects all the time. They do it in their budgets every year. They do it in their election promises during the election cycle. They indicate what the value of a project might be. Yet Senator Conroy’s excuse—his weak excuse—is that we might signal to the tenderers what we have got budgeted for that particular part of the project. It happens in tender allocations all the time; an indication of the budget is not an unusual thing. Yet Senator Conroy, again, does not want the public or the opposition—he does not want any of us—to know what is going on.

The government members have been told by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard: ‘Go out there: follow the party line; sell the message; don’t dissent.’