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

I will just make a couple of quick points. I do not want labour the point here, as interesting as this repartee with Senator Whish-Wilson is. The first point is this. I referred to one of my past careers before. I did have another past career in infrastructure finance, and I slightly disagree about the risks of greenfield investments being those matters of transparency alone—or significantly at least; perhaps that was the point he was making. Typically, greenfields investments are much more risky because there are significant demand-risk overestimates of how many people are going to use the infrastructure, because you really have nothing to base it on and there can be wild variations in the judgements about who will use it now. Transparency, in my view, cannot really quite solve all those issues. It comes down to judgement. We are all frail human beings, and judgements are often wrong, as we have seen in some high-profile infrastructure finance deals in this country in the last decade.

The second point I would make is that we have taken an ample amount of time to consult widely on the provisions of this bill, both the legislation itself and in fact even before that. A consultation paper was released in November last year and draft legislation in January, and a mandate was released in March. We have held meetings all around the country including in Sydney and Melbourne, particularly with the finance sector itself. The feedback I have received from those consultations has been overwhelmingly positive on the provisions of the mandate, notwithstanding—as I outlined in my summing-up speech—some minor adjustments we seek to make to the mandate. But presumably, if the concerns the centre is raising emanate from the private sector, they would have been captured by those consultations. I am informed that the financial sector is broadly happy with the provisions we have put in place and is confident that this can work.