Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Reynolds for her question and her interest in rolling out the NBN sooner and at less cost to taxpayers. I do first have to address the fool's gold that Mr Clare in the other place and Senator Conroy were peddling yesterday and getting extremely excited about. The document which became available yesterday was representing the sort of planning that commercial organisations do, the sort of war-gaming that they do and the sort of scenario testing that they do, which is entirely appropriate for an organisation. They do this to look at worst-case scenarios, best-case scenarios and those in between. That is what that document represented.

HFC technology is actually something that Labor were not prepared to mention previously. It was a phraseology, a terminology, which they steered clear from, and the reason for that is that Labor wrote billion-dollar cheques on behalf of taxpayers to switch off the HFC networks. The coalition did not have to spend any extra money to get these assets, which pass almost four million households and businesses in Australia's six biggest cities. As you know, Mr President, these networks already supply pay TV to many homes in the nation. I think only those opposite, really, could come up with the sort of genius and brilliance that would see billions of dollars spent to shut down networks only to then have to spend billions more overbuilding them. What we thought was entirely reasonable was, for no extra money, to make sure we had these networks available to us. (Time expired)