Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Red crayon, was it? I have complete confidence that it was in red crayon—absolute and complete confidence a la the Prime Minister! We will be moving some amendments which will, hopefully, try to make sure that we keep the providers of fibre rollout in the market. It is a viable sector, and that viable sector should have the capacity to continue.

I do have concerns about the debt that this is going to leave us with. It is vitally important that you understand that if we cannot pay back this debt, the Australian people are going to pay it back. All the money is being borrowed. You have got to have complete confidence in the Labor Party. What was I saying about the member for Dobell? He is a great asset to us! Stick by him! Stay with him! Do not let him out of your sight! Do not let the CT scan out of your sight! You just stay right next to him. I want you in every photo, holding him, arm in arm—oh, maybe not! Stay close by him; he is a great asset for us.

The coalition is proposing an amendment to impose cost discipline on NBN Co. This amendment will require NBN Co. to purchase at a set price any network from developers who have had other NBN co-competitors install that network. If this amendment is successful then NBN Co. will not be able to charge a fee greater than that set under this agreement. This will have the effect of regulating the cost to developers of having to install fibre developments in greenfield sites. Just as NBN Co.'s prices will be regulated when supplying services to brownfield sites, there should be oversight of its supply of fibre to greenfield sites as well.

The coalition proposes an amendment to preserve competition for those who currently have new fibre infrastructure. This amendment would exempt those providing this infrastructure from part 7 and part 8 of Telecommunications Act 1997. Those parts of the Telecommunications Act are funda­mentally anticompetitive. They prevent fibre network owners, other than the NBN, from providing a superfast carrier service to residential or small business owners so the Labor Party have to revert to such anticom­petitive practices. Apparently it is to provide more competition in the telecommunications marketplace. That is what they said. They said they were going to provide more competition but they have instead provided a monopoly. Now that they have the monopoly in place, as we said they would, they are legislating the five per cent above the CPI increase in the pricing so they can rip the people off. That is what they are good at.

They have to protect the NBN business case. The NBN's business case is another thing that I thought the Prime Minister might have complete confidence in. Where was the cost-benefit analysis before they went into the largest capital infrastructure process in our nation's history? I do not know where it is, but I tell you what: when Minister Conroy leaves this place, he will be the best salesman for vacuum cleaners that this nation has ever known. He will have a boot full of vacuum cleaners and he will be ready to sell, sell, sell. This man will be unstopp­able. He will slay Amway; he will slay Reader's Digest. He will be the best door-to-door salesman.

How he ever managed to get this through ERC I do not know. I just do not know what happens in the Labor Party. Did he walk into the Expenditure Review Committee and say: 'I'm about to launch on this nation about $56 billion worth of expenditure. We could build hospitals galore, up and down the coast and everywhere, and inland rail. We could build so many things: dams, roads—you name it—but we are getting ourselves a telephone company. We have already got a few of them but we're going to get another one'? And he did it without even a cost-benefit analysis. He told us the story about how he waited for the Prime Minister of the day, Kevin Rudd. Julia Gillard had complete confidence in Kevin Rudd! He waited for the former Prime Minister of this nation, before they got rid of him, and jumped on a plane with Mr Rudd, and that is how he got this through. That is how we have ended up with a new telephone company, which is actually an old telephone company. In fact, it is the same telephone company; it is just a much bigger monopoly. Then he decided he was going to put fibre into every house, every shed and every toilet in the nation—everywhere you go there will be fibre. It will just be a fibre wonderland out there. The trouble is that it is going to cost the earth.

Senator Conroy interjecting—

You should have complete confidence in it. I have complete confidence in you! So we had Optus, we had Telstra and we had other providers, and now we have the NBN, which is basically coming in as the new monopoly. We are closing down the ones we have. They have made an absolute killing because they saw the minister coming and they have leased him back the pipes and the trenches. They actually still own them. It is only a matter of 19 years and they will get them back. It is so pathetic that if you did not laugh you would cry. All they got were 50 customers and it cost $50 billion plus. That is a billion dollars for each customer. What a bargain! What an absolute financial genius! They are incredible. What a great deal!

You should recommend yourself to the Australian people at the next election on how you have gone with the NBN. I am sure they will have complete confidence in you, just like the member for Dobell. It is just bizarre. But, with the expenditure of the nation's money, the coalition have to make this thing, wherever it goes, work. It is not that we do not believe in fibre, because we do. We put about $8 billion on the table in order to get it to the node. We just do not believe in running it to every house, because we cannot afford it. We have $197 billion in gross debt. Last week that debt went up by $2½ billion—that is $2,500 million in one week. Our nation is just going down the tube. Everywhere you look, everything they touch is just manifest incompetence, and that is reflected in their polling. If somebody said, 'What do you think of the NBN?', I would just say, 'I believe that the Prime Minister of Australia has complete confidence in it.'