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

This is an outrageous attempt by the government that shows their utter incompetence in managing the legislative agenda and in the management of this issue. The two bills that are the crux of the reason the government is seeking extended hours were first introduced into the House of Representatives on 25 November last year. Senator Conroy put these bills into the public arena on 25 November and they were then introduced into the lower house. There have been changes to one of them since then, but they passed the House on 1 March this year. The government have had ample opportunity to get their house in order and have failed miserably to do so. We have seen just in the last 24 hours the government attempt significant rewriting of their own legislation. These delays to the debate, as Senator Fifield and Senator Abetz have eloquently outlined, are not of the opposition’s making. We have been ready to debate these bills at any moment over the last few days. We came here on Monday morning ready to debate the bills, but they were taken off the agenda by the government. The government then spent days messing around, drafting amendments to these bills to fix problems in their own legislation. These are problems that they have had not just days or weeks to fix but months to fix. They have had months to fix these problems because, I repeat, these bills were first introduced into the parliament in November of last year.

Now they come in here at the eleventh hour on the Thursday, when usually there is only a limited amount of time available for government business. They have known all week that if they let it drag on until Thursday there would be problems, but they have come in here and pleaded for extra hours, to keep us here tonight and to keep going tomorrow, to rush through consideration not of bills that have been examined by the committee previously, not of bills that were examined by the House of Representatives previously but of fundamentally different bills. They are fundamentally different because there are 28 pages of amendments to these bills—not just a couple of amendments but 28 pages worth. Within that there would be a couple of hundred or more changes to these bills. There are hundreds of amendments that they now suddenly want all senators to get their heads around.

Let us remember the significance of this. This is a $50 billion project, all of it funded one way or another by taxpayer debt, a debt that will be owned by the Commonwealth in some form, and they want us to rush it through just in the next few hours. They want us to rush it through tonight or tomorrow. They want us to rush it through without some decent consideration by the industries and sectors that will be impacted.

What should happen, as Senator Abetz rightly pointed out, is that this amendment should be referred back to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee. The committee that has looked at these bills should look at the amendments and should provide the key stakeholders—in particular, the telecommunication companies—with the opportunity to express their views. The government have got these bills so fundamentally wrong to date that there is absolutely no guarantee that there are not further mistakes in the 28 pages of hundreds of amendments that they are now trying to put through. If the Senate lets them get away with this and we spend the next couple of days debating these amendments and shunting this bill through, we will find that there are further mistakes, that the government have got it wrong in other ways. Then we will be back here again, at some stage, fixing the flawed agenda of the government.

These amendments are substantive enough that they should go back to the committee and they should go back because there are genuine concerns. The model that they are proposing is utterly different from the wholesale only model of the NBN that Senator Conroy has proclaimed it to be all along. The model that these amendments and this legislation will allow for will see NBN Co. selling services directly to large customers. In doing that, ultimately, if we let them get away with it, we will create yet another large, vertically integrated monopoly. If we let the government get away with it, they are going to recreate something that looks exactly like the company they are spending billions of dollars trying to dismantle—namely, of course, the old Telstra.

The telecommunication companies are expressing their concern about these amendments and, in particular, as Senator Abetz highlighted, the division 16 amendments. These amendments would largely cut the ACCC out from having input into the operating decisions on price discrimination, bundling of services and points of interconnection. This will utterly change the way NBN Co. and its operations are regulated. The amendments would utterly change it from the legislation that I spoke on in this chamber on Monday—legislation that the House has already considered—and utterly change it from the legislation that the Senate committee has considered.

So I urge the crossbenchers to recognise that these are fundamentally significant changes, that it would be grossly irresponsible of the Senate to not allow stakeholders the opportunity, firstly, to have some time to digest these changes, which were dumped on the Senate and the rest of the world only last night. We must give people the opportunity to digest hundreds of pages and, secondly, give them the opportunity to comment on them, to have some input into the decent process that the Senate is meant to pride itself on. Thirdly, we must allow the Senate committee to come back and provide the kind of rational, considered thought that led the government to adopt these 28 pages of hundreds of amendments in the first place.

If we do not do that, we are just allowing the government to treat the Senate with contempt, the telecommunication industry with contempt and, ultimately, the Australian consumer public with contempt. They will be saddled with not just the $50 billion of government debt for this NBN but all of the other problems that will come with a flawed process that allows NBN Co. to operate in a space that the government says it will not be in, yet which this legislation allows. It will be in the retail space, which will see the emergence of a company operating in a far more vertically integrated way than the government claims it wants, in doing so distorting and destroying the telco market in the future. The government should be willing to let consideration happen. There is a real question as to what they have to hide. I would urge the crossbenchers, if they believe in the primacy of the Senate and the primacy of the parliament, to reject these extended hours, to refer these amendments to a committee. We will come back. We will come back in a few weeks if you want. Senators may not like it, but let’s give it decent consideration rather than just trying to rush it through a few days.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Ludwig’s) be agreed to.