Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Add everything together and it is up around $55 billion—$4.7 billion to $55 billion. To the people of Australia who might be listening to this: you have to pay that! Someone has to pay this $55 billion. The minister originally said it would be built quickly. Even when this bill was put down he said, ‘At the very latest it will be 30 June 2018, and everyone will have it.’ Now, with this amendment that the government is putting forward, we are extending it by another 18 months, to 31 December 2020. So not even the minister is confident that this is going to be built and fully operational any time before 31 December 2020.

My only lament, again, is that we lost the 2007 election fairly and squarely—not the 2010 election but the 2007; that was the decision of the people—and there was a legally binding contract in place, the OPEL contract, and this government came in and just wiped it. I said to those involved in the OPEL contract, ‘Why didn’t you take them on?’ They said, ‘You know, you can’t fight with the government’—particularly one as focused as this one; I was going to say narrow minded, but I won’t—so they just rolled over. But had that gone through, everyone in Australia would have had that fast broadband network by today. By this amendment we are pushing back by another 18 months, to 31 December 2020, the time up until which the minister has the opportunity of declaring it built and fully operational.

If the minister has a response, I will be happy to hear it. But I suspect it is probably not a contribution that the minister could properly respond to. It is the fact of the matter; it is their legislation. They said it will not be finished until June 2018, but we are not even confident about that now, so we are going to blow it out to 31 December 2020. I think that is a very telling amendment by the government which just demonstrates clearly what this whole fiasco is about.