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

As Senator Birmingham says, he may have been thankful, because all of the bluff and bluster by Senator Brown on how well the Greens were going to do in the Victorian elections turned into nothing. The Greens actually went backwards in the Victorian election and I suggest that is probably what will happen on Saturday in New South Wales as well. But I know Senator Brown will be very keen to get there in the possibility of the Greens taking a couple of seats off Labor in Sydney. If they do, Senator Brown will not want to be stuck in this chamber here in Canberra away from the TV cameras when he could be down there.

All the pious arrangements the Greens made with Ms Gillard to guarantee her power—about openness, accountability, making parliament work and having the right sorts of times for debate—all of that piety from the Greens has really turned into abject and absolute hypocrisy. Here we are again: on a day when we not even supposed to be dealing with government business we have a couple of hours left to deal with some of the most important legislation that the Australian taxpayers will have to pay for in many a day. We are dealing with $55 billion of taxpayers’ money and, yet again, as we did at the end of last year, we are going to rush through these 25 pages of complex amendments in a few hours. Certainly we are going to sit tomorrow. As far as I am concerned, we will be here Saturday and Sunday too, because the people of Australia deserve to have someone to look after their interests and the $55 billion of taxpayers’ money that the Greens and the Labor Party are going to spend.

I do not want to be all criticism of the Greens because Senator Ludlam has some expertise on this. He makes no bones of the fact that the Greens, as the ultra-Socialist party, want the NBN to be government controlled and owned, and to stay that way permanently. I suspect, if Senator Ludlam had his way, that every business in Australia would be owned by the government as well—that is the ultimate socialist platform. Certainly, as far as the NBN goes, Senator Ludlam makes no secret of that, but he has pointed out some of the stupidities. He has joined with us in exposing the fact that there will be no competition in this wholesale delivery of services. People are starting to wake up to that. The last time we did not have competition, back in the old Telecom and PMG days, we had an awful telephone system because there was no incentive to take the latest technology.