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

It is not there for everyone, Senator Lundy, you are dead right, and that is why we say you should focus on giving it to the people who do not have it, not go and spend $43 billion rolling it out up and down every street that already has it. Senator Lundy, you have exposed the flaw in your own argument. It is not there for everyone and the focus should be on the people who it is there for.

I want to be quite clear here about what it is that we are talking about. We are talking about the government releasing the 400-page business plan for the NBN, which I note the Prime Minister has said today she wants to go through with a fine tooth comb. Forgive my cynicism, but I have seen what the Prime Minister’s fine tooth comb does before. It produces things like the Building the Education Revolution—the school halls debacle. The government’s fine tooth comb produced the home insulation debacle. Frankly, I would rather have a bit of sunlight on the NBN business plan. I would rather have an ‘Operation Sunlight’ on the NBN business plan. I would rather it was put out so it was not the government putting a fine tooth comb through it but the many experts around Australia who will have something to say about it when it is released. They are the people who might actually identify the flaws in it, the problems in it, and ensure that, if this thing has to go ahead, at least the business plan stacks up, rather than allowing Senator Conroy to say, ‘I’m going to go through it, and then I want the government and the cabinet to go through it, and then we will sign it off and you can see it all at the end of the process.’

I have seen what happens when the government gets their way and puts it all at the end of the process. We end up with taxpayers’ moneys wasted, with billions of dollars down the tube and with the types of the debacles that have plagued everything the government has done to date. With the NBN we are seeing the same trajectory—they are keeping it all inhouse and secret; they are just going to make up their own minds about it. The worst thing about it all is that they want those of us in this place to make important decisions without seeing these documents.

There is a second document that we have asked for. We have asked for not just the business plan but also the government’s response to the KPMG-McKinsey implementation study. The government spent $25 million on that study. Yes, most of it has been released; the government, however, have already started rejecting a good number of the recommendations made in the KPMG-McKinsey implementation study. They paid $25 million for good advice, but they have started to reject it. They have rejected recommendations that would ensure there was decent competition at least in terms of who was providing the fixed wireless services to the seven per cent of Australians who are not going to get fibre. They have rejected that and are going to keep it all inhouse for NBN Co.

There are all sorts of questions being asked around the industry about the points of interconnection and what impact that is going to have on prices and how it is going to work. These questions go to the heart of how the government responds to the McKinsey study and what is in the business plan, yet the government is refusing to reveal its thinking on these key critical issues.

What is there to hide? That is the key question here. There should be nothing to hide. The government proclaims it is all about transparency, openness and honesty, so why not put these documents out there? Why not ensure that the business plan is public? Why not ensure that the response to the implementation study is public? Why not allow us to make informed decisions that every individual senator should be able to make on the key legislation that the government wants to bring forward?

From day one, ever since Senator Conroy got off that fateful plane flight with Mr Rudd, the coalition has called for a cost-benefit analysis—a proper Productivity Commission assessment of the NBN. We have called for it because we think it is the only responsible thing to do when a government is running this type of back-of-the-envelope program. I remember, and I know that Senator Lundy would well remember, that the 2007 election involved a different Labor policy. It involved a $4.7 billion policy called ‘fibre to the node’. Just in case anybody missed that figure, it was $4.7 billion, not $47 billion, for fibre to the node. When they discovered that the policy did not stack up, when they discovered they could not deliver on that policy, when they realised they went to the 2007 election with something that they could not deliver, what happened? As we now know, because Mr Rudd was a rather difficult Prime Minister to get to talk to, Senator Conroy hopped on a plane with him and, in a short plane ride, Senator Conroy and the then Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, took the $4.7 billion fibre-to-the-node network and changed it into a $43 billion fibre-to-the-premise network—that was their turnaround in policy. From that moment on we have consistently called for a Productivity Commission cost-benefit analysis of that because it is the only responsible thing to do.

I again say: you have roped every mum and dad Australian, every man and woman in Australia, every old person and every child in Australia into being compulsory shareholders in your NBN—and, at the other end, they are going to be compulsory consumers because it is the only way they are going to be able to get their phone lines connected and access broadband in the future. They are being compulsorily required at either end to be consumers and shareholders. The government want to drag Australians into this $43 billion experiment and see every Australian locked into it.

I note that today in the other place the House defeated a private member’s bill by just one vote—the slimmest of margins—to provide for the Productivity Commission to conduct that cost-benefit analysis. Next week we will reintroduce that legislation in the Senate and give the Senate a chance to have a say. I know there are senators who believe that a decent cost-benefit analysis is worth undertaking. They believe that, if you are going to spend this much money, you should actually make sure you are doing the right thing, setting it up the right way and investing in the right technologies. These are sensible things that we should be doing.