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

You know? That is right: Labor knows best. That is the response from Senator Lundy. We actually think it is worth getting a bit of expert analysis, not just going on a gut feeling, which is what you are doing.

We note that, at the beginning of this week, the OECD released a report that was pretty scathing of what the government has done. The report suggested that the government needed to be more prudent, transparent and robust in the way it was developing this NBN. That is what we want to bring to the process and to the consideration of the legislation before this chamber. To the process of the NBN we want to bring a more prudent, transparent and robust approach and we want that to be done through a Productivity Commission analysis of the costs and benefits of building the network. It is not an unreasonable thing to ask for. We are even saying that we will not hold the government up in progressing with it; we just want this cost-benefit analysis actually delivered to bring about the prudence, transparency and robustness that is so critical to ensure that taxpayers’ money is well spent.

We also want to bring some prudence, transparency and robustness to the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2010, because that is what we are talking about here. We want to bring about that transparency by having the business plan. We want to bring that robustness by having the business plan. We want to bring that robustness by having the response to the implementation study. We want to make sure that this chamber makes prudent, sensible, robust and transparent decisions. That is what we want and that is all we are asking for.

Let me return to the first point I made. We are asking for it because the Senate demanded it yesterday. We are saying that there should be consequences to the government for thumbing its nose at the Australian Senate. There must be consequences or else the decisions of this Senate become quite meaningless. I urge those on the crossbench to think about that—to think about the fact that if every time we bring a motion into this parliament and demand documents, asking for them to be produced, we simply let the government thumb its nose at us then it will keep doing it. There have to be consequences; we have to hold it to account and that is why this motion should be supported.