Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to follow on from the comments that Senator Birmingham made. I think he was onto something when he was comparing the inaction on the submarines while Labor were last in government to what they were doing on the NBN. They did spend billions of dollars on the NBN and we all saw the results of that—not much service to people and nothing rolled out, but lots of money spent. We saw no planning on the NBN. After reflecting on hearing Senator Conroy, who is now in charge of the submarine in a shadow capacity for the Labor Party, I thought, 'What would be more frightening? Having a Labor government do nothing on submarines or having Senator Conroy doing a lot? What would be more frightening for us as a nation?' We all saw the results for the NBN when the Labor Party tried to spend billions of dollars, did nothing and wasted money in convoluted contracts, when they clearly did not have a commercial bone in their body in order to sign something which will protect the interests of this nation.

We just saw an example of that. The shadow defence minister of our nation would like to take, as somehow almost tendered documents, statements made on a radio station by a European submarine builder, which are apparently evidence enough of what the budget should be. If this is how the Labor Party put their budgets together in government, maybe it starts to explain a lot about why our budget is blowing out and why they could never hit a deficit target in their whole period in government.