Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (Senator Conroy) and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (Senator Evans) to questions without notice asked today.

What we have had confirmed today is that the NBN tender process was entirely flawed. In addition to that we have seen that Minister Conroy has misled the Senate. The evidence is on the record—it is on the Hansard. This process went for some 18 months and we know that it was canned as of April last year. We also know that in February last year the minister, Senator Conroy, misled the Senate when he specifically said that the process was going well. He specifically said that the process was successful. He specifically said, ‘I am very confident it will be successful.’ The minister knew in February last year—this is on the public record—that the process was flawed and yet he came into this chamber and said specifically that the process was in fact not flawed but successful and that, indeed, the outcome would be successful. We know exactly what happened some two months later—it was canned.

As a result, $30 million of taxpayers’ money has been wasted. It has gone down a big black hole, down the gurgler in Canberra, so no taxpayers, no Australian people, will benefit from that whatsoever, apart from of course the many consultants and lawyers—and we do not know how many lawyers’ opinions have been obtained in this process.

The process is set out in this Auditor-General’s report—and as a member of the Joint Standing Committee of Public Accounts and Audit I know that the Auditor-General’s reports are held in high regard. The Auditor-General is a man worthy of great respect and, indeed, those in the Auditor-General’s office know what they are doing. They are credible. This report I have in my hand right now is a damning indictment of Senator Conroy. It confirms that he has misled the Senate and it also confirms on the public record that $30 million has gone down the drain.

Government Senators:

Government senators interjecting—

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It says that the process is flawed.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It doesn’t say that! Where does it say that?

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It does not say specifically that Senator Conroy has misled the Senate.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ludwig interjecting—

Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order on my right!

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What we can say based on the Hansard of what he said in this parliament in February, that the process is successful and will be successful, is that it has been confirmed today that he misled the Senate. Senator Conroy should come in here and apologise to the Senate. He should say sorry to the Australian taxpayers for the $30 million that has gone down the tube and specifically for misleading the Senate.

In this National Broadband Network process, the $30 million was over an 18-month period. In terms of the costs, that is simply disgraceful. The report talks about the costs and the possibility that, if the process continued, there would be a potential payment of just terms compensation to Telstra for the compulsory acquisition of the right to use its assets, should a non-Telstra proposal be successful. That is set out in the report at page 18. So it was flawed from the beginning, and we know that billions of dollars may have been required to be paid to Telstra as a result. The process was flawed from the beginning, yet it was not canned until 18 months later, in April last year. We know that much.

What else do we know? We know that the government have a history of waste and mismanagement—this comes on the back of GROCERYchoice, Fuelwatch and the schools stimulus debacle in terms of the blow-out in spending. We know that they have spent $1 billion—in fact, it would be in excess of $1 billion now in their more than two years in government—on consultants, when they said they would be cutting consultant expenditure by hundreds of millions of dollars over those years. So the waste and mismanagement is shocking. But today what has been revealed, thanks to the questions from Senator Minchin, is that Senator Conroy has been unable to answer questions put to him in the Senate. It is a great shame. He should hang his head in shame and apologise to the Senate for misleading the Senate and for the gross waste of taxpayers’ money.

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad that the opposition has chosen to take note of the answers to these two questions because it demonstrates that this new opposition under yet another new opposition leader has not really changed that much. We saw a demonstration in question time today of the climate change sceptics, reinforced again by the behaviour of the new opposition leader, not only with his new policy but by the sceptics with whom he is still happy to associate. We also saw the same global financial crisis scepticism they have demonstrated for the last 12 months. Despite the fact that about half of the opposition’s front bench in the Senate were with us here today, we still saw that very sloppy and audacious approach to policy, and I will deal with part of that when I deal with Senator Evans’s discussion about the issue of compensation that was before us in the Senate today.

Looking at the week, we have had the very sloppy approach to policies that this opposition might take forward in an election year. We have had talk about the very successful My School website, yet a very unclear position and, if I recall the behaviour of the shadow parliamentary secretary for education, some disquiet as to how the nature of the questions being asked in this place reflects the ultimate policy position that this opposition may take. The next day we dealt with workplace relations, and once again there was the approach of trying to have it both ways about how industrial relations arrangements should work in this country. Finally, today, there was again the approach of trying to have things both ways about how we tackle and deal with climate change. There was a failure, as Senator Wong highlighted, to accept what even the previous Prime Minister accepted, that there is a cost that needs to be managed, and that the lack of any compensation arrangements in the coalition’s policy means that cost will need to be borne elsewhere. Even Senator Fielding has acknowledged that it is going to be a cost to our schools, to our education system, to our health system, if we go down the path that is being proposed by Mr Abbott.

Let me deal briefly with the NBN issue. What the audit report did highlight, as Senator Conroy pointed out when he welcomed the report, was that the global financial crisis was a factor in the aborted request for proposals process. This was something Senator Barnett failed to mention at all when he sought to pretend and put into the report comments that simply do not exist. The report does not at all indicate that Senator Conroy misled the Senate. As was highlighted this morning by the Prime Minister when he also dealt with this report, the $17 million needs to be considered not only in the context of what occurred last year with the global financial crisis—which this government has managed in a world-first, successful and enormously creditable process—but also in the context of the overall cost of this program. These are again points that Senator Barnett did not raise.

Let me conclude briefly with some points about the compensation arrangements. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is designed to limit Australia’s carbon emissions—something that Tony Abbott’s program will not be able to do, and certainly not to the magnitude necessary to reach our targets. It does this by making polluters pay for the pollution they produce and rewarding those who reduce their carbon pollution. The scheme includes direct cash assistance for nine out of 10 Australian households, and low-income families are expected to receive 120 per cent of any anticipated costs in direct cash assistance. So there is not only full compensation but more than full compensation. What the opposition failed to understand today was that you can have a tandem approach in relation to compensation. You can have this direct cash assistance but also an ongoing process, which is the annual review of household assistance packages as part of the budget process. So we are saying that not only have we made assessments that we believe will be able to provide adequate compensation but we have also built in a mechanism which will enable us to review that and ensure that Australian households, Australian families, are properly compensated into the future.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to take note of the answers given to questions today by Senator Conroy and Senator Chris Evans. These answers demonstrate that, when it comes to the big issues and when it comes to their massive expenditure, this government does not understand the detail of its own plans or policies. They have no idea how to administer them. They have no idea how they work. They simply waste taxpayers’ money time and time again and hurt the Australian public in the process.

With the release of the Auditor-General’s report yesterday we have seen yet more damning evidence that Senator Conroy and the government have messed up the implementation of the National Broadband Network. It was their big election policy promise. They promised at the time to build a $4.7 billion fibre-to-the-node network and they promised that construction would start within 12 months of their being elected. Instead, we saw delay upon delay upon delay in the way the network tender process was handled. We saw a blow-out in all of the costs related to that network tender process.

We have seen some $30 million of taxpayers’ money wasted by the tender process, a damning report from the Auditor-General and the government in a humiliating backdown saying it would not back down from a policy that it could not achieve but it would up the stakes—double or nothing; in fact, in this case it was 10 times or nothing. They turned it into a $43 billion promise to build a fibre-to-the-home network. That is right: they could not get a tenderer, they could not get the project off the ground to actually build fibre to the node in a $4 billion to $5 billion promise so they times it by 10, decided to roll it around the country and are going to spend $40 billion plus. It is unbudgeted and has no business plan. Quite clearly, this will end up being as unsuccessful as their first failed attempt and will waste many millions of dollars more of taxpayers’ money on lawyers, accountants, consultants and all of those people who did very well out of the tender process—everyone except the Australian taxpayer.

We have evidence within this that Senator Conroy, in promising they would deliver a successful tender right up until the time when it was revealed that they could not, in effect misled this house. He said, ‘We will announce a successful tenderer within the month,’ when he knew full well at that stage they had no capacity to announce a successful tenderer.

We then had Senator Evans having to come in here in a humiliating way at the end of question time and confirm that he too misled the house. Just yesterday he misled the house when he tried to tell the Australian people that 92 per cent of all households would be compensated under the government’s great big new tax, the emissions trading scheme. He said yesterday ‘92 per cent of all households’, claiming of course that basically everyone would be fully compensated. Well far from it that everyone will be fully compensated—far from it indeed. Under the government’s own rather dodgy estimates we will see at least half of all Australian households left worse off as a result of the big new tax, having to fork out more from their own pockets to maintain their standard of living and to pay for their electricity and for all of the consumer goods that that will flow through to.

This government does not know how it is administering its own policies. Senator Evans was deliberately misleading the house, attempting to mislead the Australian people or simply did not understand his own policy. That is the reason he was caught out today and had to come into this chamber and acknowledge that he said the wrong thing yesterday, that he got it wrong.

Then we have the Prime Minister himself being caught out. The Prime Minister in his usual morning television appearances tried to convince the Australian people that he understands the detail of the scheme. He said there would be a one-off adjustment to the price of consumer goods. What rot. If you are having a market system with a variable price for carbon, surely there will be a variable impact flowing through to the price of consumer goods. That is why the government has not promised an annual review of its compensation. It is yet another example of this government—Senator Conroy, Senator Evans and the Prime Minister—getting it wrong on the details of their big picture policies. (Time expired)

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to take note of the answers given by Ministers Chris Evans and Conroy today. I begin by highlighting that Senator Evans’s response was quite clear that we recognise the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will indeed have a modest impact on prices but the government is providing substantial assistance to help households adjust. In contrast, what the coalition has put before us is a giant climate change con job. We know that sceptics have beaten a path to their door. The coalition have tried to argue that the CPRS is a giant tax on households. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The coalition’s policy is certainly a tax. How will it get funded? Certainly that revenue will have to come from the taxpayer. The coalition’s policy completely fails the test. It does not reduce pollution. We know that pollution may indeed grow under the opposition’s policy while billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money—money the government will have to find and taxpayers will have to pay—will be spent on this scheme, and for what? For no outcome. It is a Liberal climate change con job. There is no cost-free way of tackling climate change, as Senator Evans highlighted in question time today.

Who should pay: the taxpayer or the polluter? You say the taxpayer; we say the polluter. Australian emissions under the coalition’s plan will grow and Australian households, who you purport to be so concerned about, will be no better off. Unless you put a hard legislative limit on carbon pollution, polluters will keep polluting and climate change will just get worse. That is why the CPRS puts a limit on emissions. That is why the CPRS charges polluters. If they in turn need to pass costs on to consumers then we compensate them.

By contrast, the climate con job put forward by Mr Abbott does not put a limit on pollution. Mr Abbott thinks climate change is crap, and he has confirmed that again and again. The opposition leader’s climate change plan is nothing more than a climate con job. It does less, it costs more and it will mean higher taxes for Australian families. The opposition’s scheme has three key problems. Firstly, it does not work, it does not require anything of the polluters and it has no cap on pollution. Secondly, it will slug taxpayers instead of big polluters. Thirdly, it is unfunded and it will mean big cuts in services, or higher taxes.

To tackle climate change we know that we need a CPRS or an ETS to transform our economy and to drive pollution down. We have to get on with the job of getting our pollution sources under control, for a greener and more sustainable Australia. The sooner we do this, the less it will cost Australian households. Abbott’s plan will cost this country. Why? Because big polluters will not have a framework to drive down their emissions. Our industry will fall behind what the global effort requires. The coalition has shown that it is out of touch on this issue. The sceptics have beaten a path to the coalition’s door.

We know that more than 30 countries already have emissions trading schemes like the CPRS in operation, and others are working towards schemes of their own. Why? Because they know that these schemes are the most efficient. These schemes will reduce costs for their citizens and their families. We are in step with the rest of the world. There is one lone wolf in this scenario, and that is the Leader of the Opposition. His approach is not being taken by anyone in the world. On the other hand, the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is fully costed and funded. We know how much it is going to cost: $3.3 billion over 10 years. The cost is to be met by polluters and, where the cost is passed on to consumers who buy those goods and services, the Commonwealth government will compensate the consumers. By contrast, Mr Abbott’s costings, his climate con job— (Time expired)

Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With some pleasure, I rise to take note of answers given by Minister Conroy to questions asked by Senator Minchin. The Auditor-General’s report released yesterday unfortunately shows that not only did the Rudd government waste money with round 1 of the National Broadband Network promise but they deferred getting the expert advice that would have told them that the process was essentially doomed to failure from the start. So they got away with doing just that—wasting money—for a period of time. What has happened? In the process, millions of dollars have been wasted and Australians have come to expect from the Rudd government promises without delivery. Look at the waste of money: megabucks for not one extra megabit under NBN round 1. Unfortunately, history is repeating itself with NBN round 2.

The Auditor-General said of NBN round 1 that the one-stage tender process was ‘not conventional for a competitive assessment process of this size, nature and risk’ and made a complex commercial transaction considerably more complicated. The Auditor-General criticised the prescription of fibre-to-the-node technology in NBN round 1 and noted that it was ‘limited in potential scalability’. The Auditor-General concluded that, while the Rudd government was made aware of key risks and their broad significance in early advice that it received from the department, the consequences of some of these key risks were not fully assessed until late in the request for tender process.

History is repeating itself. The best that the minister can say about the Auditor-General’s report is, ‘No recommendations.’ The minister is like a naughty schoolboy who has been rapped over the knuckles. In fact, he has had ‘the cuts’. The Auditor-General has given Minister Conroy the cuts, but Minister Conroy is trying to say, ‘But it’s okay. He didn’t expel me from school, so I should be able to chance repeating the same mistakes with NBN round 2.’ And NBN round 2 is repeating the same mistakes: megabucks for not one new megabit. There is not one new customer under NBN round 2. There is not one new internet connection. But there is a CEO of NBN Co. who is being paid $1.9 million a year. There is a government relations manager who is being paid almost $500,000. The company has not yet delivered one new internet connection, one new megabit, one new customer or one new service. History repeats itself.

History repeats itself again with the minister deferring getting expert advice until it is arguably too late. The minister has again and again deferred answering questions about who will get what, when they will get it, where they will get it and how they will get it under NBN round 2 until the implementation study is delivered. We are led to believe that that will be delivered at the end of February this year. The government is again seeking to defer the gaining and release of independent and external advice as to the risks of its NBN round 2. So history is repeating itself with NBN round 2. Megabucks were spent for not one new megabit under NBN round 1. Thus far the situation is exactly the same under NBN round 2: megabucks being spent and not one new megabit. We look forward to seeing history not being repeated post the receipt of the implementation study. We look forward to seeing Australians getting the national broadband network that they deserve.

Question agreed to.