Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We are talking about a huge amount of money when we are talking about the NBN. This is one of the millstones that is still hanging around Prime Minister Gillard’s neck from the old Kevin Rudd days. It has been some time now since the $43 billion price tag for the NBN was put out there. It was at a time when the ABC series The Hollowmen was showing. I well remember all these hollow men standing in front of a whiteboard and having a discussion about how much money to throw at a particular program to make sure they got the appropriate political impact and ensure they got attention from the public about what it was that they were proposing to do and saying, ‘If you want to make people believe that you are taking action and that you are making a difference, you have to get that number right.’ In that episode of The Hollowmen they were standing around the whiteboard and essentially wondering whether the figure they came up with would pass the ‘whoo’ test.

I can just imagine Kevin Rudd and a few of his 30-odd-year-old advisers standing around the whiteboard and wondering, ‘Should we make it $5 billion? No, that’s not enough. What about $10 billion? No, that doesn’t sound like a serious investment. How about $20 billion? Ah, we’re getting closer. How about $40 billion? Oh, that passes the test.’ But the problem with $40 billion is that it sounds too much like you have picked it out of the air. You have got to make it look a bit scientific. So you have to put an uneven number at the back. You have to put a ‘3’ there and make it $43 billion. That sounds like you have at least given it some thought—as if there is some science behind the figure you came up with; as if there is some sort of proper assessment behind the identification of what is a significant amount of money that is supposed to be committed to this.

The former government, under former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and former finance minister Lindsay Tanner, prided itself on the fact that they had not conducted a cost-benefit analysis. I sat in Senate estimates with the finance department—and it is the same secretary of the department now as it was then—and asked them about all the ins and outs and asked: ‘Wouldn’t it be more consistent with finance department attitudes, policies and best practice to go through a cost-benefit analysis?’ It is on the record—and it is well established—that we have not conducted a cost-benefit analysis for this massive investment of taxpayers’ dollars.

I congratulate Senator Penny Wong, as the new Minister for Finance and Deregulation, for trying, very late in the process, to put a little bit of rigour around all of this. We have got Inspector Clouseau—also known as Penny Wong—out there trying to find out what Minister Conroy was up to. Here we are, two years into this process, and finally there is a minister in the government saying, ‘Hang on; we should put a little bit of independent oversight over all of this. We shouldn’t just take the word of Minister Conroy on this. We shouldn’t just take the word of NBN Co. about all of this. We should have a closer look at what it is that is being proposed.’ One day it is $43 billion and then it is $26 billion and then the government advertising says that the government has committed $43 billion but it is really $26 billion. Then we have an implementation study that suggests that we are going to have super profits in order to make sure that this is a commercially viable venture.

Whatever way you look at this, there has never been a serious attempt to test whether this approach proposed by the government is the best way to deliver faster and affordable broadband to all Australians. We on this side of the chamber are committed to faster and affordable broadband, but we are not convinced that the government and, in particular, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy have done their homework. They are taking a very cavalier approach in their treatment of taxpayers’ dollars. So we think it is quite legitimate that there ought to be proper scrutiny applied to the way they go about committing to spend these sorts of sums of money.

This is the government that gave us the home insulation fiasco. This is the government that committed $2½ billion to put pink batts into people’s roofs as a stimulus measure and after they have spent half of the money they have to spend the other half to take those pink batts out of the roofs that they had put in there in the first place. This is the government that has had waste and mismanagement wherever you look, whether it is for home insulation or for school halls. There has been secrecy wherever you look, whether it is on the mining tax revenue assumptions or whether it is to do with the NBN or the waste and mismanagement in the Building the Education Revolution.

The government well knows there are many aspects of this legislation we are dealing with here that we can agree with. However, as a former leader of the Labor Party—one that I know Senator Conroy is very close to, and that is Simon Crean, the member for Hotham—once said, you cannot unscramble the egg. In this legislation there are 260 mentions of the NBN, even though the minister does not quite realise this. So this legislation is directly connected to the government’s plans for the National Broadband Network and, on that basis, it is very important that the Senate and the Australian people have the opportunity to properly scrutinise what is behind all of it.

We were promised a new era of openness and transparency by this government. Julia Gillard clearly was very scared in the two weeks after the election that she would not be able to hold on to her seat of power. I am sure that Senator Farrell, who is sitting across the chamber, was very worried that his little initiative towards the end of June in overthrowing the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was going to result in defeat of the Labor Party at the ballot box. I am sure that Senator Farrell, along with Senator Arbib, Senator Feeney, Mr Bill Shorten and all the other people who were actively involved—