Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

I will leave the technical details of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Fibre Deployment) Bill 2011 to my colleagues that have greater expertise in the area of telecommunications and broad­band. What I want to do is make some brief remarks about the NBN and reflect on the relevance of that project to the government's recent record in adminis­tration—or should I say maladministration.

The Australian people now know there is one thing worse than the Labor government breaking its election promise. And what is that? It is when the Labor government actually sticks to its election promises, when it keeps its commitments. You see, the achilles heel of this government, of the Australian Labor Party, of the Rudd-Gillard governments, has always been the implementation of their programs. That is their great weakness. It has been from 2007, for nearly four years now, under this government. The list of failures and disappointments has been as long as it has been shameful. Some of it might have even been mildly amusing if not for the fact that billions of taxpayers' dollars have been wasted and, in some cases, lives lost.

There has been the farce of GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch, two websites supposedly designed to ease the pressures on the cost of living. The idea was that, if the government kept watching, the price of cabbages and the price of unleaded petrol would come down. Instead they went up. Perhaps they should stop watching. After the fiasco of GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch, many have said, 'If we can't trust the government to keep the price of onions down, how can we trust them to control the world climate?' or, indeed, as is being debated today, 'How can we trust them with spending tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars on internet infra­structure with the NBN?' And how right they were. After GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch we have had the fiasco of the pink batts, the installation scheme that was compromised by widespread rorting, that put hundreds of thousands of homes at risk, that caused 200 house fires and four deaths and that cost the taxpayer billions of dollars to roll out and then tens of millions of dollars more to clean up—an absolute and utter fiasco.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of the Rudd-Gillard government's imple­mentation failure has been in my shadow portfolio area of education. First, we had the computers in schools fiasco arising from Kevin 07's election promise to give every one of Australia's one million secondary students their own laptop. How I remember those election ads with the then Leader of the Opposition holding a laptop computer and saying, 'One of these will go to every student. This is the toolbox of the 21st century.' How could we forget it? So what has happened? Nearly four years on we know that the scheme has been under­budgeted by up to 500 per cent, with the Commonwealth forced to kick in extra money and an unwelcome financial burden falling on state governments and also of course on the parents of those children. We also know that the rollout is way behind. At budget estimates we found that only 55 per cent of the just under 800,000 required had been delivered and installed, with a deadline looming on 31 December this year. Lastly, not a single one of those 800,000 computers promised has been connected by the Commonwealth to the fast, up to 100 megabits per second fibre broadband as Kevin 07 promised.

But if we thought the laptop fiasco was bad, the $16.2 billion Building the Education Revolution program, colloquially known as the Julia Gillard memorial school halls program, has truly won infamy in the annals of government incompetence, waste and mismanagement in this country. The BER has been a fiasco. In the end, the government hand-picked BER Chairman, Brad Orgill, who has been forced to admit something that everyone in the community and the coalition have been saying right from the start—that is, that government school projects, particularly in the three biggest states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have been overcharged, when compared to their Catholic and independent equivalents. Do not believe me; read the Orgill report. That is a disgrace. Those kids who go to government schools—like I did—missed out when compared to kids at Catholic and private schools. That is disgraceful from a party that, allegedly, stands up for the parents of those children.

But, by then, billions of dollars had already been wasted by Labor state governments, confirming the Common­wealth Auditor-General's finding that the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations did not put in place sufficient oversight mechanisms so they could even assure themselves that they were getting good value for money. I did not find that; the Auditor-General found that. He found that the Labor Party spent $16 billion and that the Commonwealth department of education did not have the oversight mechanisms to ensure that those schools were providing value for money. Is that a disgrace or not? The sum of $16 billion, spent by this lot, and not even appropriate oversight mechanisms to ensure that it was money well spent. They sit there, trumpeting the BER as money well spent. The Auditor-General has said that the money was badly spent.

I am not recalling any of these instances for my own pleasure—on the contrary—although I am getting pleasure. It pains, at least, the opposition—not that lot over there—to see billions of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars flushed down the fiscal toilet. Some of the ideas were not too bad, but they were a shambles in the implementation. The ideas were battered to death by the appalling implementation of the Labor Party.

All these fiascos share commonalities that tell us a lot about the government's approach to policy implementation—a pattern, I fear, that we will see repeated on a much more monumental scale. On what? The rollout of the NBN. If you think the BER has been bad, just wait for the NBN—this shame of incompetence, this total inability to efficiently implement programs, even though some of them may have been worth while. But that is the grand failure of the government, over four years, with respect to not all their ideas but their incapacity to implement. That is their failure.

I think it was Talleyrand who said of the French Bourbon dynasty: 'They forget nothing and they learn nothing.'

The same could be said of this loser government.

Let me just outline to the Senate how it works down there in the PMO. Some barely pubescent senior adviser down there gets a brain snap, the grander the better, because the main point is that it has to make a great, 10-second media grab and be an election slogan. That is the key: it has to make a great, 10-second media grab. It might be 'A computer for every student'—a great grab, a good idea. It might be 'A hall for every school'—a great slogan. Or it could be 'Broadband for every Australian'—another brain snap that sounds great. No thought whatsoever is given to implementation. No-one thinks through all the issues, no-one costs it and no-one does feasibility studies or business cases. Figures are just plucked out of thin air, as they have been for the last four years.

But by then, of course, it is too late. The announcement has been made, the government has been committed and the political effect has already been achieved. Then the hard work starts—or at least it should—but in, many instances, it does not or it cannot. The case in point: the National Broadband Network. Once the poor bureaucrats are sent out, with the unenviable task of giving flesh to government brain snaps, they soon discover that the govern­ment's so-called policymakers have not thought through all the implications. That is the problem. The sums initially budgeted for are grossly underestimated, time lines bear no relation to reality, there is insufficient expertise to take on the task and so its implementation has to be sub­contracted to other parties who take the money and run, unhampered of course by any form of accountability.

What the government lacks in brains—their own—they do not lack in money; the taxpayers. After all, you can always borrow more of that! 'Who cares,' says the Labor Party. Sure, you might saddle future generations with $80 billion of debt, in a little over three years. But, hey, you do not have to worry about repaying it, do you? And, in the meantime, you can grab any brief flash of glory on the off-chance that something actually goes right. Yes, you get a good headline. Call it 'The stupidity premium'—billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to pay for the fact that this government speaks and then commits taxpayers' money before it actually thinks. That is the problem. This has happened time and time again, and each time more and more money is at stake—GroceryWatch, petrol watch, pink batts, computers in schools, the BER and others. And so the list goes on. Now we face a project which dwarfs any previous infrastructure in Australia's history. This is the grand-daddy of them all, and it is in the charge of this lot.