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

Thank you, Senator Macdonald, for that very apt interjection, which highlights the fact that Senator Conroy, throughout this debate, has been more interested in talking about all of the past decisions, all of the past debates, than he has been in actually talking about and defending his legislation, the proposal that is here before us. We do not hear him stand up here saying that yes, there will be competitive fibre operators in the marketplace competing with NBN Co., because he knows that there will not be, he knows that there cannot be under this model that he is proposing. The challenge is there, Minister: if you want to stand up and try to convince the Senate that your legislation is not going to put businesses out of business, then please do so—feel free to actually give us a compelling argument that you are not going to drive private providers already in the marketplace out of business as a result of what you are proposing.

The opposition have made it crystal clear in our amendments, and in our debates on these amendments, that fundamentally they are about providing a better, competitive framework in the greenfields development space—so that housing developers, when they are putting together a development, have a choice of where they can go to, that there are some benchmark standards, that there is a legislated pricing arrangement in place so that they know they can get somebody in to deploy the fibre and that it will ultimately, of course, be sold through to NBN Co. and operate as part of your grand NBN network. So we are not trying to undermine your goals in relation to dictating fibre as the technology of choice for all Australians—or for 93 per cent of Australian premises. We are not trying to undermine your desire for NBN Co. to be the primary wholesale provider. We are not trying to undermine any of those things—