Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Unfortunately Senator Abetz’s content expired at least 10 minutes ago. It was quite sad to see that there is this incredibly important motion that Senator Abetz wants to promote here today, and he had to give his speech twice because he actually ran out of any serious content whatsoever. He ran out of content and just filibustered for the last 10 minutes, and I invite anybody listening to go back and check the Hansard to see how repetitive Senator Abetz was forced to be to fill out his 20 minutes. It was such a sad and pathetic performance. It is like groundhog day today, because this is exactly the same obstructionism, exactly the same performance, by those opposite to delay and ensure that Australians do not get access to cheap and affordable broadband. I look forward, Senator Humphries, to seeing how you vote on this, what you have to say on it and, more importantly, what you are going to say to the people of Gungahlin if this motion is successful, because you will be stopping them getting cheap and, for the first time, affordable and decent broadband. The residents of Gungahlin are listed to be, as you well know, the long-suffering residents of Gungahlin, because this motion will ensure that Telstra shareholders cannot vote without the certainty of this bill passing.

This is not the first time we have had to debate this exact content. We were told, ‘You can’t debate any bills to do with the National Broadband Network unless you give us the expert panel report.’ Then it was, ‘You can’t debate any bills unless you give us the ACCC report.’ Then it was, ‘You cannot debate the content of the bill unless you give us the McKinsey report’—and on and on and on. In recent days, and in the other chamber, we were told, ‘We will not get behind this unless there is a cost-benefit analysis done.’ How many times can you run the same line, pretending you actually support better broadband, saying, ‘We support better broadband; we are just not going to support actually allowing the bills needed to pass.’ Australian consumers—