Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

What actually got me interested to come down here was having recently been up in the seat of Lyne—and the whole issue of greenfields was raised with me very recently. Isn't it extraordinary that we see from this minister a complete mess and, not only that, attached to it a gigantic bucket of money? We will get, at another time in this place, to the discussion about the gigantic bucket of money, because, quite extraordinarily, it is just that—it is just a bucket of money. As far as we can see, there is absolutely no indication at all of any thought, rhyme or reason that has gone into the funding allocation for this—it is just a bucket of money. I am not sure that that is an entirely appropriate way to run the government's coffers. That is probably the greatest understatement I could use in this place.

I know that colleagues will understand completely when I say that the government's ability to manage the economy and to manage money is absolutely deplorable. We only have to look at the $198 billion of debt that the government has managed to rack up to ask: does the government even have the ability to deliver the NBN in any way, shape, form or capacity so that it looks like some kind of functional network? I am not sure that it does. While we seem to be inching ever closer to something—and I use 'inching' in the loosest sense, because it is probably a lot less than inching—we seem to be getting to an end point of this giant bucket of money being spent on something that may well be superseded by something else very, very quickly. I am not sure that that makes sense either—that we are going down the road of spending tens of billions of dollars from a gigantically big bucket of money for something that may well be superseded in the very near future.