Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity (Senator Conroy) to questions without notice asked by various coalition senators today.

In my 17½ years in the Senate, I do not think I have ever seen question time reduced by a minister to such a travesty as I saw today. Senator Conroy dived and weaved around questions without making the faintest attempt to answer them. In taking note, I would like to take a reasonably forensic look at some of these questions and the way Senator Conroy did not answer them.

At the start of question time, Senator Wong in one of her answers described the question of the NBN as a ‘complex policy transaction’. If it is such a complex policy transaction, why is advice being provided very, very late in the piece to the government, and why haven’t they thought to make these inquiries before? The government’s inability to quantify the costs and benefits now is surely not an excuse to squander billions of taxpayer dollars. Their refusal to release the business plan must surely increase doubts about the NBN commercial case and thus Labor’s economic competence.

No answer was given to Senator Cormann in reply to the questions that he asked. Senator Brandis then asked what I thought were very original questions: when, who and why? Even though these questions were denigrated by Senator Conroy, he could not answer them or give any degree of detail in the way that Senator Brandis asked. Respected economics writer Ross Gittins, in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald, wrote an article that began: ‘I am starting to get a really bad feeling about’ the NBN. This is so across all sections of the economy and across all sections of business. If it is good enough for the cabinet and the government to know what is going on with the NBN, the least they could do is release some information to us in the Senate and the House of Representatives. We are, after all, the elected representatives. But no definite answers can be given.

Senator Birmingham asked: ‘Will the document be released?’ And, finally, at the end of Senator Conroy’s response, we got a one-word answer: ‘No.’ It is regrettable that Senator Conroy treats this chamber with such disrespect that he laughs his way through every question and makes a joke of serious economic questions. This government spent $1 billion to set up the Home Insulation Program, and $1 billion will be needed to remedy it. I am sure we all hope, when we consider that $43 billion will be spent on the National Broadband Network, that a similar amount will not be needed to remedy any mistakes that arise.

The government expects the Senate to vote on this mammoth project with no information. I totally respect Senator Xenophon’s view on this. He was offered a private briefing on the grounds that he would maintain a seven-year silence. It is like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales—seven years silence in return for a policy briefing.