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

Senator Hanson-Young, you may not have been alive when Telecom ran the telephone system, but I can guarantee you the system is light years in advance now of what it was then. Why? Because Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and all of the other telcos have been competing—they have been getting the latest technology and keeping prices down. But here we are going to have a government monopoly, and what incentive will it have to move forward later?

I see that Senator Ludwig is getting anxious about my speaking on the motion to extend the sitting hours that is before the chamber. He was not quite so concerned about Senator Conroy getting up and giving a 10-minute speech about the NBN bills. I do not want to do that. I just want to point out how inappropriate it is that even I have not yet had an opportunity to look at this very serious legislation. I claim no expertise on the NBN, but I have tried to very follow it through in its various forms over the last three or four years. I have not even seen the amendments—yet I am supposed to vote on this sometime in the next day or so?

Telstra is not going to make its final decision until September. Why do we have to deal with this today? Why not leave it until the June sitting? We still have five, six or seven months before Telstra is going to make any decision, and from what you hear around the traps Telstra is getting a bit uneasy about it all. So what is the hurry? Why deal with this now? Why not leave it until the June session and give us an opportunity to seriously look at the amendments? Give the stakeholders more of an opportunity to find the flaws because I guarantee that they will find flaws, as they have done with every piece of legislation that Senator Conroy has introduced. Senator Ludlam just said that he is not convinced that all 25 pages of amendments—which I was led to believe that he and the government put together—are true. I appeal to Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding: what is the rush about this? Why are we doing now what we did at the end of the session last year? Remember last year? We rushed the NBN bills through. We sat all hours of the day and night. We are doing the exact same thing now. When are you ever going to learn that this mob in the Labor Party just take you for fools. They just dud you all the time. They pull the wool over your eyes and we get very poor legislation. The Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate has indicated our position on this motion and I support that position.