Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

We are going to be here for a long time if the minister deliberately refuses to answer the questions. I did not ask what developers would charge. I do not expect you to know anything about that, Minister. After all, all of the ministers under the present Labor Party government combined have had what I think is a total of about 13 years working in some form of private business. So I would not expect Senator Conroy to be commenting on what contractors charge. That was not my question, as the minister well knows. My question was simply this: is it a fact that a developer of a greenfield site will have the option for NBN Co. to install the infrastructure at no cost to the developer? The other alternative—as I understand it from the evidence given at our committee of inquiry—is that the developer could get a private contractor to install the infrastructure but it would be at a cost. Regardless of what the cost is, it would be at a cost—naturally enough, because private contractors, unlike the union movement and this government, do not work for free. They have got to get enough money to pay their employees, pay their taxes—