Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

A Labor senator tells us there is an implementation plan, but only Labor senators are allowed to see it. The coalition are not entitled to see it. If it is available, Senator Lundy, table it now. Go to Senator Conroy and tell him to table it. Make it available so we can digest it over the weekend and we may well then be in a position to genuinely consider the legislation that Labor wants us to debate as the first item of government business today.

This is a matter of fundamental principle of this chamber, and might I add that it is a fundamental matter of principle for our friends in the Australian Greens and Family First and for Senator Xenophon. If they allow this government to get away with this gross act of arrogance, they will do it to them again and again and again. I might say that it is good to see that Senator Lundy has moved across to Senator Conroy. I hope she is asking the minister to table the documentation as I requested of her.

This is now the acid test for the Australian Greens in the Labor-Green alliance: whether their media statements and all their joining in with Senator Birmingham in asking for these reports were just media posturing so that they can say, ‘Look how we are pushing this government.’ They have come some of the way, but today is their time for reckoning. Are they actually going to live up to all their hyperbole and rhetoric or, when they come to the first hurdle of actually saying, ‘This Senate should not be treated with contempt,’ will they say, ‘Oh, well, we are in alliance with Labor; yeah, we had better let them get away with it’? Because once you let them get away with it once, they will know that the Greens have become Labor’s doormat. They will know that whatever they want to hide they can hide with the concurrence of the Australian Greens, despite the hyperbole and despite all the rhetoric to which we have been subjected.

Make no mistake: if this is such a vitally important piece of infrastructure, as we have been told, and we are being asked to consider legislation that will deal with the implementation of the NBN and its relationship with Telstra, surely we are entitled to the business plan and to the implementation plan. It is only a 400-page document.