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

I move Australian Greens amendment (20) on sheet 7669:

(20) Schedule 1, item 1, page 19 (lines 11 to 20), omit section 187KB, substitute:

187KB Commonwealth must make a grant of financial assistance to service providers

(1) The Commonwealth must make a grant of financial assistance to a service provider for the purpose of assisting the service provider to comply with the additional costs that service provider's incur in complying with the service provider's obligations under this Part.

(2) The terms and conditions on which that financial assistance is granted are to be set out in a written agreement between the Commonwealth and the service provider.

(3) An agreement under subsection (2) may be entered into on behalf of the Commonwealth by the Minister.

This amends the governments grants provisions to state that the government must make a grant to telcos covering the additional costs to implement the data retention legislation as recommended by the PJCIS. This is a very serious amendment. It goes to some of the issues we traversed last night and a bit earlier today about the costs. I recognise that Senator Brandis is presumably bound up in an Expenditure Review Committee skirmish at the moment under fairly tight budget constraints. That is one of the reasons why we have no information as to how much the government's contribution is going to be. I would have thought that was an argument for delaying passage of the bill rather than progressing it, but that argument does not seem to have persuaded either the government or the opposition.

This is tremendously important to the question that nearly everybody who has been following this debate at any distance wants to know—'Is the taxpayer picking up the tab or are we picking up the tab through increased data charges?' There are arguments for and against.