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

There we have from the minister ducking, dodging and weaving around the very direct matter that Senator Macdonald raised about what NBN Co. is doing in reality. Maybe in their business plan they talk about reducing costs over time, but when it comes to dealing with the regulators they are doing something very, very different, Minister. Yes, it was an NBN Co. discussion paper—a discussion paper that went to the ACCC. It proposes allowing price hikes of up to five per cent above inflation on the price of broadband services in Australia. It proposes up to five per cent above inflation. We see them arguing in their discussion paper, which I will quote from:

This commercial flexibility is ... necessary because NBN Co is subject to considerable demand uncertainty.

Demand uncertainty! Wow! And there I was thinking that the minister had always assured us that the demand was very certain, that the projections were of course very clear, that the projections were modest, that the projections were conservative and that we could all have confidence in the business plan of this NBN Co. What do we have NBN Co. saying? Let me quote further from them:

Demand uncertainty remains in relation to issues such as the price payable by end-users for broadband services over time ...

What have Mr Turnbull and the opposition been saying consistently about this? We have been saying consistently that there is no certainty that people want to pay for the very, very high speeds at the far higher prices that NBN Co. will be offering. There is no certainty that people will want or embrace more than the basic service offering in the main from NBN Co. That is what the opposition have been saying consistently in our arguments about whether this is a valid investment and whether this investment is one for which the Australian taxpayers should be paying up to the tune of $30-plus billion in construction costs and many billions of dollars in payments to Telstra and Optus that we now see come with 'stay quiet' clauses, with shut up clauses essentially, that stop Telstra and Optus from actually advocating their own wireless services as competitive alternatives to NBN Co.'s fibre service. So we see the government and NBN Co. operating in a very, very different way from what they say.

Once again, it is case of this government, as I have said before, speaking with a forked tongue on these matters as they do on so many other matters, whether it is the NBN Co. or a raft of other matters such as their assurances on the carbon tax and bringing the budget back into surplus. On all of these matters, they say one thing but in the end they ultimately find themselves doing something very, very different. In this regard the minister claims he wants to maintain competition in terms of fibre deployment on greenfield sites, yet he is asking this parliament to pass legislation that does quite the opposite. He says that NBN Co. is going to bring prices down over time and that the NBN Co. business plan facilitates prices being brought down over time. Yet, when it comes to the crunch of dealing with the competition regulator, NBN Co. goes and seeks precisely the opposite. The chair of the ACCC, Mr Sims, may wish to consider it an ambit claim by NBN Co., but you have to ask, then, what type of culture the minister has established in setting up the NBN Co. such that they are out there making ambit claims, wanting to set themselves up in a manner that allows them to rip off the Australian public and the Australian consumer as much as they possibly can. NBN Co. is stepping into the public domain and saying, 'We would quite like to be able to raise prices by five per cent above inflation. We think that's a perfectly reasonable thing for us to do.' Never mind the fact, as Senator Macdonald rightly highlighted, that at present so many Australians face real cost-of-living pressures. We have seen the prices of housing and basic utilities like electricity, gas and water skyrocket during the duration of this government. All of those people will only face additional pressures under the government's planned carbon tax, and now we have the minister setting up his multimillion dollar, taxpayer funded, debt riddled monopoly of NBN Co., which wants to put prices up by more than five per cent.

When we ask them why they want to put prices up by more than five per cent, or when they are asked by the ACCC to provide evidence to justify why they want to put prices up by more than five per cent, they cite demand uncertainty as the reason they want that approval and that authority to raise prices by more than five per cent above inflation—demand uncertainty! Once again, this government and this minister are speaking about the NBN with forked tongues. Once again, the government is coming in here and proclaiming that its business model is certain, that the billions of dollars that taxpayers are in hock for on this NBN are secure. The reality, though, is a vastly different story. Taxpayers certainly do not face any semblance of security from this NBN Co. They do not have security and they will face enormous debts to the public purse for years and years to come. As you fund the building of this NBN you are forking out many billions of dollars.

But what did we see yesterday in the tabling of the first report of the Joint Standing Committee on the NBN, the committee that looked at this legislation that is before us? It has also now provided its first update report on the NBN. We found that the NBN was unable to provide that committee with the most basic of key performance indicators, with the most basic of details about how taxpayers' money is being spent. That committee would dearly have loved to be able to report in a manner which provided details on just how much taxpayer money has been provided to NBN Co. to date. Of the billions of dollars forecast to be given to NBN Co. in the current financial year, how much has already been handed over? How much have they spent? That is detail we would like to have known. We would like to know how much they have spent on their many inflated executive salaries versus how much they have spent on deploying and delivering fibre, wireless and satellite services. But no, we could not get any of those things.

Could we perhaps get some basic information about how much fibre has been deployed by NBN Co.? Could they tell the joint standing committee that in any decent type of KPI? No. We did not have detail of how much fibre had been deployed. How about how many premises have been passed by? How many households and businesses have been passed by? Once again, the government was incapable of telling the standing committee, through NBN Co., how many premises have been passed by, how many of those premises have opted to have a connection to the NBN and how many of them have taken up services.

Every so often, at a time of its own choosing, the government and NBN Co. drip feed titbits of this information. But what we really want for the NBN, and what the Australian public should rightly demand for the NBN, when the government is spending tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money—all of which is borrowed, all of which is public debt on this project—is some level of accountability. The people rightly expect some level of transparency.

When the government shut down scrutiny of NBN Co. in regard to the application of FOI laws, when the government refused to allow the longstanding Public Works Committee of this parliament to scrutinise the building of the nation's largest ever public works infrastructure project, what did they say? They said, 'We will give you a special forum to ensure the accountability of the NBN and to ensure transparency.' 'That special forum we will give you,' they said, 'is the Joint Standing Committee on the NBN.' What are we getting out of that? Of course, we are getting sweet little out of that because the government refuses and NBN Co. is unable to provide a series of consistent updates on key performance indicators about what is actually happening. So much for that being the vehicle of transparency and accountability for this project, because the government has failed terribly to provide the information necessary for the committee to act as a vehicle for transparency and accountability. Again we see the government speak with a forked tongue in this regard. They promised that this joint standing committee would be the vehicle for transparency, but they are failing to deliver.

Senator Wong interjecting—

Senator Wong wants to join in the debate. As finance minister, she should be very, very concerned about Senator Conroy's application of this project. Senator Wong, of course, is the joint shareholder of the NBN.