Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

To be sprung by Senator Conroy is to be hit in the back by a rainbow. In his performance this morning, he was sweating profusely and glowing like a pig because, all of a sudden, it is all coming crashing down around his ears. He does not have an understanding of the most basic terms of his own legislation. He does not have an understanding of whether it involves the term ‘NBN’. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘No,’ he repeated thrice. ‘No’—it is in here 62 times. Now he is querying the trade practices implications of proposed section 577BA of the Telecommunications Act 1997, so the only way to do this is to actually refer to subsection (7) of that section, where it says that you can do what you may and it will be accepted for the purposes of section 51(1) of the Competition and Consumer Act. It does the same in subsections (8) and (10). What this arrangement does is allow them to walk around—and in some instances, absolutely leave behind—the proper oversights as conducted by what was known as section 51, part (1) of the Trade Practices Act. These are the sorts of technical details that are very important for people in the business community, and we cannot get them because the government will not be up-front and transparent. It is absolutely essential for all the people involved in the business arrangements to know what is going on. It is our job to ventilate those issues, and it cannot be done when we go through the nebulous process where they will not actually deliver and cough up the details. It is a case where they will deliver the study material after the exam. They want us to vote on it and then they will give us the material to study.

As an accountant you have to come up with business plans; people are coming up with ideas all the time. The first things you ask are: ‘How much is it going to cost, what are your cost tolerances and how much do you think it might blow out by?’ You would want to know what it will return and whether it would be safer just to leave your money in the bank. Even in the McKinsey report, it says that this is going to return six per cent. If I were going to go out and find $43 billion, borrowing the majority of it, just on a hunch I would suggest to the person that they had better get a better return than six per cent—