Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In three days; indeed. Again, you can calculate the cost of an infrastructure project because it is mostly hardware, and you can come up with an idea of the cost. To calculate the benefits of network infrastructure, you just need to make things up—and the results you get are entirely sensitive to your input assumptions and to how you weight them. We have no idea how Professor Ergas weighted his, but he came back with an imaginary number that said: 'Actually, don't bother: the costs of building the NBN exceed the benefits, so just don't bother.' And that is the kind of cooking of the books that we want to try and avoid. Because these numbers carry such weight—they carry political weight, they carry economic weight; they carry enormous weight inside Treasury where decisions are made as to whether things will get funded or not—it means that the method of evaluation must be as transparent as possible, it must be reviewed, and it must take advantage of best practice elsewhere. Australian authorities and communities are not the only ones grappling with these very questions. The amendment proposes that that report—six months in, and then every 24 months after that—be placed on Infrastructure Australia's website, unredacted, within 14 days.

Amendment (15) is equally important. It proposes that the details of each method of preparing the CBA approval which was in force, including the weight required to be assigned to each factor, be taken into account. We want to see that published. That is the purpose of this amendment. How did you weight it? How big was your imaginary number—derived from the magic of being able to drive very rapidly down a new eight-lane freeway that has no traffic on it? It is fine that you have to come up with monetised factors to be able to weigh the scales of costs and benefits, but at least let us know what were hard data and what was pure fantasy. This is a very important amendment. I am very glad, I believe, that we have opposition support for it. I hope Senator Johnston has been persuaded, by the clarity of my argument, that probably one of the more important things we will do tonight is to provide a bit of a spotlight on the way that CBAs are undertaken in this country, so that we might actually get a little bit more honesty into the process. We have created that rolling review process precisely so that our methodology stays up-to-date as practice around the world improves. I commend these two amendments to the chamber.