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

Madam Acting Deputy President, I am talking very specifically to this bill. This is about the government’s secrecy in not being prepared to release information that is directly relevant to us being able to properly scrutinise this legislation. The government, from the Prime Minister at the top and all the way down, promised us a new era of openness and transparency, but openness and transparency are the important features that are missing in the handling of this bill. That is why I have to go through some of the history, Madam Acting Deputy President, even though I am sure that Senator Farrell would rather that we did not remember.

One of the reasons this government did so badly at the election was that in the last three years we saw a similar track record of secrecy and cover-up, which led to a deep sense of suspicion across the Australian community as to whether they could trust where this government was proposing to take us. This is particularly relevant to the National Broadband Network because, as I have described in my opening comments, it was initially $43 billion worth of taxpayers’ dollars and then later we were told $26 billion of it would be taxpayers’ dollars. Whether it is $26 billion or $43 billion coming out of taxpayers’ pockets, it is a lot of money and it deserves proper scrutiny. It deserves a proper process to ensure that taxpayers are getting value for money. That is something that the Rudd government did not pursue, and of course that is why it had to keep secret what little information there was in order to ensure that people could not understand exactly what was on the table and nobody could prove how ineffective this spending potentially was. The point is that if we are going to invest $43 billion in a project we ought to have a cost-benefit analysis. That is pretty basic: what is the cost and what is the benefit we are going to get out of it? Then we can make a clear and informed judgment as to whether, in light of the benefit we can achieve, the cost required is justified.

I point out again that the Rudd government, in their period in office, prided themselves on the fact that they were not doing a cost-benefit analysis. At least now Minister Wong is attempting to have some scrutiny of Senator Conroy’s activities. She wants to have some independent oversight; she is sending in the detectives and auditors to look at what is on the table. She wants to review independintly the business case. She wants to review the 2010-11 corporate plan by NBN Co. It is very late in the process, but at least Senator Wong is trying to make sure that there is a degree of scrutiny of Senator Conroy’s activities. On this side of the chamber we congratulate Senator Wong for at least making an effort. But, again, our concern is that the outcomes of that process are not going to be appropriately transparent for all the Australian people to review and assess. Today in question time the minister refused to commit to releasing the outcomes of her detective work to the Senate and the Australian people. My concern is that we are being asked to deal with a piece of legislation which is directly driven by the government’s plans for the NBN, yet there are ministers in the government who are having second thoughts about the way the NBN process has been handled so far, to the point where they are commissioning independent reviews and independent scrutiny, and we are expected to make a decision on this legislation before we have the benefit of the results of those reviews and can properly assess what has come out of Senator Wong’s scrutiny of the activities of Senator Conroy.

We do not believe that that is appropriate. If the government is having second thoughts, why should the Senate not be having second thoughts? If the government thinks there is a need for more scrutiny, and if Senator Wong thinks she wants more information to ensure that what is being proposed is the right way to go, why should the Senate not have access to more information to ensure that what is on the table is the right way forward? As I mentioned earlier, it has not been properly scrutinised to date as to whether the government’s proposal in relation to the NBN is the best way to ensure faster and affordable broadband. That ought to happen. We should not go down the road of spending $43 billion on something unless we know it is the best way of doing it. That is simple—policy development 101; it should be, anyway. That is why we are not in a position at this point in time to support this legislation, even though there are bits in it that are quite sensible and do have our support.

The concern we have is that the secrecy that has been displayed by this government in relation to this bill is not an isolated incident. There is government secrecy wherever we look. This is a government that was supposed to let the sun shine in. This is a government that promised that everything was going to change after the scare on 21 August. This is where you interrupted me before, Acting Deputy President Crossin, but this is very relevant to this piece of legislation. Two weeks it took, after the election, to form a government, and a key feature for Mrs Gillard to convince Independents to support her—