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

Mr President, I apologise. I should not allow myself to be distracted by the rabble over there. You are right, I apologise. The demand for a cost-benefit analysis is based on the assertion that it is going to not be financially viable. McKinsey’s, as I have repeated, are saying it is financially viable. The business case, which we will release shortly, says it is financially viable. There is not a cost-benefit analysis anywhere in the world that has come back and said that the benefits are not a positive. So, in actual fact, on the one hand we have a financially positive business case, and then we could spend a couple of million dollars of taxpayers’ money to prove that there are benefits across the entire economy. Those opposite who pretend that they are about fiscal responsibility would simply seek to waste taxpayers’ money. The Productivity Commission, like the OECD and a range of other people that Senator Bernardi has referred to in his question, all make an argument that we should keep the copper open; that we should keep the copper that has served this country well for 50 to 70 years in some cases—let’s keep it in the ground. Let’s ignore the fact that we are now moving to the end of the copper era and moving to the fibre future. The copper in the ground at the moment in actual fact is degrading. It costs—(Time expired)