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

The opposition equally will not be supporting this amendment. We concur in some ways with the comments of others in the chamber. We believe that there is potential for this amendment to go one of two ways. One way could be for so much commercially sensitive information within those agreements published as to render them fairly well ineffective in terms of being published. The other way is that you will end up with a lowest common denominator approach, or potentially a highest common denominator approach, where we do not get the competitive, innovative, thoughtful solutions and approaches to these access agreements that do spark competition, that do drive different carriers to take different approaches that can lead to better outcomes for customers. In this case we need to have some faith in the work that the commission does and have confidence that they will, under all of the new powers that either the minister has or that they have, in different respects ensure that they get good competitive outcomes. We think that this could be an amendment that either backfires or potentially ends up as a meaningless amendment. Either way, we think it is better not being in the bill as it proceeds.

Question negatived.