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

Senator Conroy, the invitation is there. When I sit down, I will welcome you standing up and defending this legislation. I will welcome you standing up and actually telling the Senate that you believe that this will not put people out of business. That would a brave thing for you to do, Senator Conroy, because deep down you know that it will put people out of business, that it will see small operators, Australians who have invested in building a company, lose equity in that company; that it will see them ultimately have to shed staff, that it will change the model for the deployment of fibre in greenfields sites in Australia, and in doing so it will truncate it all into the one monopoly provider—your NBN Co. That may be great, for you to try to stack up the business model of NBN Co., but it will be bad for these developers, it will be bad for the households who purchase in those developments. It will probably see people ultimately having to wait longer to get services, it will see them ultimately paying more for those services and it will of course see a lack of innovation in the delivery of those services—all because you want to somehow prop up and underpin the financial case for the NBN. That is not good enough.

That is why the opposition stand behind these amendments. We have, unlike you, listened to the concerns of the greenfields fibre operators. Senator Macdonald, myself and others on the joint standing committee have actually listened to those concerns. We have read their submissions, we have heard from those businesses and we have heard them all say very clearly: 'This legislation is a problem; this legislation is a threat to our business and a threat to our jobs.' And, unlike you, we have actually responded to those concerns. Unlike the government, we have heard the concerns and we have decided that we will actually deliver, in this legislation, something that addresses those concerns and provides at least a skerrick of opportunity—and it will be a skerrick of opportunity, given the multibillions of dollars of taxpayer funds and of government debt you have underpinning the NBN Co. But it will at least provide a skerrick of opportunity for these businesses to be able to survive into the future.

So the challenge is there, Minister. When you come back to your seat, when your rise to your feet—which I hope you will do—tell us: do you think there will be a single greenfields provider left in Australia after this legislation passes and comes fully into effect? Do you think there will be anybody actually out there rolling out fibre, aside from NBN Co. and those who NBN Co. pay to do so? Because, from the answer you gave to my previous question, that it is all about choice, you made it pretty well crystal clear that your choice is a Hobson's choice, that developers in Australia will simply be left with a choice of getting it free from NBN Co. or having to pay a private provider—and the upshot of that, of course, will be that it will be the private providers who go out of business. It is your call, Minister: tell us whether you think there will still be a business there for them; convince me that there will be, somehow—because for the life of me I cannot see it in what you are saying.