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

With the greatest respect—and the Attorney-General has been here longer than I have—I cannot recall in my experience a government bringing forward a bill with support from the opposition that it did not know how much it would cost. You do not know to within the nearest $100 million what it is going to cost. That is remarkable.

Senator Brandis interjecting—

I can finish, Senator Brandis; I am still going. It is remarkable that you would bring forward a bill without knowing how much it is going to cost or how you are going to evaluate the costs. A specific question: unless you are going to be walking something of a tightrope, the government are going to be facing claims by industry at very different scales, operating very different kinds of back-end systems, who are going to be putting all kinds of claims to you. Without casting aspersions on the telecommunications sector, you are going to be in a position of having to judge whether these are ambit claims or whether they are reasonable. Presumably, industry is not going to put cost claims to you that do not cover their costs. I understand it is going to have to be case by case, and maybe that is why you cannot give us an aggregate figure. What is your process going to be for assessing the fairness or otherwise of these cost claims by different providers?