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

Minister, would you prefer it if I yelled at you the whole time? That is fine! I can give you a bit of passion if you want and plenty of substance to this argument as well. I can give you plenty of substance for the Australians who are going to be paying off the debt on this for many years to come. I can give you plenty of substance for the Australians who are going to be wondering why they have been burdened with this pipedream of yours and why they have been burdened with this white elephant from the government. I can give you plenty of substance to allow Australians to ask why the government is insisting on rolling this out up and down every street of Australia in the manner it is proposing, rather than focusing on delivering services where they are genuinely most needed. There is plenty of substance there.

As I said, I do not shy away from our opposition to this—not at all. Yes, we will be opposing these bills, but we have also approached these bills constructively. We have highlighted problems in these bills. Opposition senators who participated in the Senate inquiry into these bills highlighted concerns, some of which your amendments have at least attempted, in some ways, to actually address. While your government senators were happy to brush it under the carpet and propose that the bills be passed as they were, you clearly were not satisfied with that, because you have come out with 28 pages of amendments since then. The opposition has at least subjected these bills to far greater scrutiny than your own senators have. The opposition in the other place proposed and raised issues of concern and moved some amendments there as well. The opposition is proposing a raft of amendments here, because although we think this is a bad proposal—a flawed proposal—we are willing to put in the hard yards to try to make sure that it does as little harm as possible. That is what we are hoping to at least achieve from this process.

We want to hold you to your word. You say that this will be a wholesale only provider, and that is what we want to hold you to. We want to make sure that that is what it is. When you say that this will be subject to stringent competition rules, we want to hold you to that. When your government says that it wants to be open, accountable and transparent in its operations, that is what we want to hold you to. That is why we have proposed the amendments that we have proposed in this space. The folly of it all, of course, is that you have now proposed your own raft of amendments, most of which fail to deal with the concerns that we have highlighted, yet you come in here and want to have a debate about proposals that are substantially different from what they were this time yesterday. You want to have a debate about those all of a sudden, and you want it to be a debate of substance. What is not unreasonable is the fact that we asked the question whether, to the best of your knowledge, this is it—what we have before us. That is the question for you, Minister, as I put it at the outset: will you tell us whether your department is working on any further amendments or any further changes to the amendments before us—whether you know that there are other changes to come. Do not give us the glib answer, ‘We might correct a typo here,’ or that you ‘might’ do something else. Tell us the truth—is the work happening behind the scenes? Are senators going to be ambushed with yet more amendments and do you know that they are already on the way?