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

by leave—I move:

That––

(1)

On Thursday, 24 March 2011:

(a)

the hours of meeting shall be 9.30 am to 6.30 pm, and 7.30 pm to adjournment;

(b)

consideration of general business and consideration of committee reports, government responses and Auditor-General’s reports under standing order 62(1) and (2) shall not be proceeded with;

(c)

immediately after motions to take  note of answers today, the routine of business for the remainder of the day shall be as follows:

(i)

tabling and consideration of a report of the Selection of Bills Committee,

(ii)

tabling of Clerk’s documents,

(iii)

committee memberships,

(iv)

government business order of the day no. 3––National Broadband Network Companies Bill 2010 and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network Measures—Access Arrangements) Bill 2011,

(v)

government business order of the day no. 7––Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011, and

(vi)

government business order of the day no. 8––Issues from the Advances under the annual Appropriations Acts;

(d)

divisions may take place after 4.30 pm;

(e)

the question for the adjournment of the Senate shall be proposed after the Senate has finally considered the bills listed in paragraph (c); and

(f)

if the Senate is sitting at 10 pm, the sitting of the Senate be suspended till 9 am on Friday, 25 March 2011.

I wish to take the Senate through the motion so that there is clarity. What the motion seeks to do is amend the hours for today so that we sit from 9:30 to 6:30 pm, then have an hour for dinner and then resume at 7.30 pm and continue until adjournment. We will continue to consider general business and committee reports. In addition to that, immediately after the motions to take note of answers today—so there will be question time and then the motions to take note of answers—the routine of business for the remainder of the day will be as laid out in the motion. It will include the tabling and consideration of reports—in other words, the bibs and bobs that the Senate would normally undertake and the tabling of the Clerk’s documents, as I understand that it is important to do that.

Then there will be government business order of the day No. 3, the National Broadband Network Companies Bill 2010 and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network Measures—Access Arrangements) Bill 2011. Then we will move to government business order of the day No. 7, Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011. Then we will move to government business order of the day No. 8, issues from the advances under the annual appropriations acts. That will be collectively called ‘the appropriations bills’. Divisions may take place after 4.30 pm. In addition to that, the question for the adjournment of the Senate shall be proposed after the Senate has finally considered the bills listed in paragraph (c) of the revised motion that I have just moved.

In addition to that, if the Senate is still sitting at 10 pm this evening, the sitting of the Senate will be suspended until 9 am on Friday. I have also been asked to include that if it were to continue substantively into the remainder of Friday then, by agreement, we would suspend for one hour for lunch and one hour for a dinner break. We would then suspend at 10 pm on the Friday and resume on the following day, which would be the Saturday, at 9 am, and continue on that same program until those bills are completed—if that is clear.

I will provide some explanation for this unusual circumstance. The revised hours are because, if the NBN bills are not passed today, it is a minimum of seven weeks before they can be passed, which would—

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting—

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senators on my left, we need to get the motion heard and then you can go into debate.

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

Telstra have indicated that they cannot proceed with the preparation of the EGM to ratify the NBN Co.-Telstra deal until this legislation is finalised. The government views these bills as urgent and they need to be completed. This week the time frame for completion of the deal is affected by a number of interrelated factors. Telstra and NBN Co. do need to finalise definitive agreements and the ACCC will need to consider Telstra’s structural separation undertakings. By way of explanation—

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting—

The Acting Deputy President:

Order! Senators on my left: we have already had a notice from the chair that we need to hear this. I am asking you to desist from yelling across the chamber.

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

In addition, the ACCC have an eight-week minimum period to examine the agreement. This includes a period of public consultation. Both the government and Telstra have indicated that the definitive agreement, once settled, will be reviewed by respective independent experts before being put to final shareholder approval. The Corporations Law requires notification of all shareholders. The preparation of documents and minimum legal requirements require eight weeks to proceed. This period cannot, of course, begin until the ACCC has endorsed the proposed agreement. Telstra have recently postponed the EGM from 1 July, the date they originally announced for shareholders to consider the agreement. This continued uncertainty is causing concerns for Telstra’s one-million-plus shareholders. This is about ensuring we provide shareholder clarity around the future of this company. In the longer term—

Honourable Senators:

Honourable senators interjecting—

The Acting Deputy President:

Order! Senator Ludwig, I am going to try again. I cannot hear the minister putting the motion, so could senators on both sides desist from yelling across the chamber.

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

In the longer term the deal will fundamentally transform the competitive dynamics of the Australian telecommunications sector. The full structural separation will be achieved when Telstra migrates its customers to the wholesale-only NBN and decommissions its copper network.

This does provide us with an opportunity to ensure that we can pass this legislation, put this agreement and ensure that we have all the preparatory work done so that it can proceed. That is the reason for asking the Senate today to deal with this before we go home. I do understand that senators will have made arrangements. I do appreciate the ability of the Senate to deal with this expeditiously. The legislation and the motion will permit us to focus on finalising the second reading amendment and the committee stage as soon as possible so that it can be forwarded to the House of Representatives.

I will not delay the Senate any longer. The longer I talk the less opportunity will be provided for those opposite and on this side to debate the substantive matters that are associated with the bill.

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

This motion is yet another demonstration of this government’s absolute incompetence. The government’s administrative incompetence and their policy incompetence are very well known. I think what is less appreciated is this government’s legislative incompetence, their inability to manage the parliamentary program in both the House and the Senate. This failure to manage the legislative program is all the more amazing when you consider just how thin this government’s legislative program is.

You would remember, Madam Acting Deputy President, how this current government fought and scratched, how they huffed and puffed, how they pulled every trick in the book to try and form government after the last election. And you would assume that, when a party fought so desperately to form government, fought so hard, that they would have a significant legislative agenda, that they would have a program for the nation, that they would have significant reforms which they wanted to implement through the parliament of Australia. That is what you would think. But if you look through the legislative program of this year and last year you would be surprised. At the end of last year the great legislative item which this parliament passed, at the behest of this government, was the national weights and measures act. When you look through the agenda at the end of last year for the most significant piece of legislation that government had fought for and come into office to pass, it was the national weights and measures act. As you look down the list of bills this year, you would be hard pressed to find the answer as to why they fought so hard to get back into office. The answer, we know, cannot be the carbon tax, because this government did not go to the polls with a carbon tax.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They campaigned against it!

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

As Senator Abetz said, they actually campaigned against it. So we know the carbon tax was not the reason that the government fought so hard to form office and was not a piece of legislation that they desired to put through this place. But I think the answer you find when you look down the legislative program as to why the government fought so hard to get here—and the answer that those opposite would usually give, and Senator Conroy would give—would be the NBN legislation. That is perhaps the most significant reason for being for this government.

So the opposition were pretty surprised on Monday. We were here and we were ready to go on the NBN legislation. Senator Birmingham was champing at the bit to get into this legislation. He had been up all night preparing and had had little sleep. He was dreaming of the opportunity to get stuck into this piece of legislation. And guess what: there we had the iconic, emblematic piece of legislation for the Australian Labor Party, the NBN legislation, and they were not ready. The only thing you could point to as a reason for being for this government and they were not ready. That was on Monday.

That brings me to Tuesday, when, again, the opposition was ready to go. Senator Macdonald was primed and excited and champing at the bit. You could see Senator Macdonald bursting to get out of his seat to get stuck into the NBN debate. Senator Macdonald was ready but you will be amazed to know that again the government was not ready. No, they had amendments that they had to take to caucus.

So, we come to Wednesday. When Wednesday came around, Senator Fisher was beside herself with excitement ready to get into this debate—she still is—and guess what: Senator Conroy advised the opposition that he was not ready. And then around midday yesterday we found that five pages of amendments to this legislation had been lobbed into the parliament. Then, around 3 pm on Wednesday, 20 pages of amendments were lobbed into the parliament—making 25 pages of fresh amendments—and all of a sudden the bill becomes urgent. All of a sudden it has to pass through parliament straight away, at the earliest opportunity. It becomes, theoretically, what it always was: the most crucial piece of legislation in the government’s agenda. These 25 pages of amendments fundamentally change this legislation. The amendments are causing great concern to Telstra and to Optus. They fundamentally change the role of the ACCC. They are huge and material changes and they deserve appropriate scrutiny. They deserve to be studied carefully. This parliament and this Senate should do its job to scrutinise those 25 pages of amendments that were lobbed into the parliament only yesterday. The opposition is determined to perform that critical function.

The opposition has been ready, willing and able from Monday to deal with this legislation, and we still are. But we are in this situation today for two reasons. The first is that the government has proven time and again that they cannot manage their legislative agenda. The second reason that we are in this situation, and it is a reason that compounds the first, is that this government did not allocate enough sitting days. Even with the thin legislative agenda that they have, they cannot manage that within the sitting days that we have. We said at the outset of the parliament that the government should have scheduled more sitting days. Already we are finding ourselves in the situation where the government’s legislative agenda is out of control.

We know that the cry from those opposite, as it always is, will be that somehow this situation that we find ourselves in is the opposition’s fault—that the opposition has been delaying; that the opposition has been obstructing; and that the opposition is not undertaking scrutiny. That is always the cry from the other side to cover their incompetence and maladministration. But it is not true. We are a constructive and positive opposition. We liaise carefully and closely with all parties in the chamber to make sure that this Senate runs efficiently and well. That is what we do on this side of the chamber. But despite all the goodwill on this side and despite the constant communication, still this government cannot manage their legislative agenda. We will not cop for one second any suggestion that the situation we are in today is the fault of anyone other than those on the other side.

I do have a slight degree of sympathy for Senator Ludwig, because I think it is Senator Conroy who has put Senator Ludwig in this position—Senator Conroy’s absolute incompetence. NBN is shaping up as the biggest debacle of this parliament, and that is a big call. There were plenty in the last parliament—pink batts and school halls—but I think this parliament’s signature debacle will be the NBN. If Senator Conroy cannot manage this legislation, how on earth is he going to manage the policy and legislation if it actually gets passed?

We are not going to cop the blame for this situation. It stands fair and square with the government. We will be opposing this motion. There is no need at all for the parliament to be in this situation. But if, as looks likely, this motion does succeed with the support of others in the parliament, we are ready, willing and able to be here for as long as it takes to provide adequate scrutiny. We should not be in the situation of having this important legislation crammed into the last day. It should have been dealt with earlier. It is the government’s fault but we stand here ready, willing and able to apply the scrutiny. Senator Birmingham will be leading in that. We will be opposing this motion.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those opposite once again demonstrate their credentials that they are about demolishing the NBN. They have set themselves the task to demolish the NBN. They stand here and shed crocodile tear after crocodile tear. They will complain. But they have, for a year and a half, consistently filibustered these debates at every single stage.

Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are doing it well. You do not need our help.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection from over there. Why don’t you spend some time in Geraldton with those people who now have a genuine broadband service because of the development of the National Broadband Network? People are now, for the same price, getting ten times faster speeds and double the downloads. To those Western Australian senators I say: go to Geraldton. To those Tasmanian Senators opposite I say: go and talk to the people using the NBN in Tasmania. They will tell you that they are getting a fantastic service. The school in Tasmania that used to pay $60,000 for the same connection it gets today now pays $1,400. That is $58,000 that it can spend on educating kids because that money now is not going to Telstra. The educational experience of those kids has been enhanced enormously. But the Luddites over there—the self-confessed ‘I’m no Bill Gates’—demonstrate every day that they are about nothing more—

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy President, I rise on a point of order. Would you please draw the speaker’s attention to the motion before the chamber, which is about sitting hours? This minister is debating the legislation that we are extending the sitting hours for. He is filibustering to stop us getting on to that legislation. So would you draw his attention to the motion before the chair and ask him to be relevant to the motion rather than debating the issue that is going to be debated later.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you for your assistance, Senator Macdonald. In Senator Fifield’s contributions he ranged quite widely, so I am giving Senator Conroy equal access. But I will draw his attention to the question. We are looking at the question of hours. Senator Conroy, your attention is so drawn.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President. I accept your ruling. Senator Fifield made a broad range of points right across the portfolio, but the one thing that the other side do not want to do is use the extension of hours in this chamber to actually talk about how people are being affected and how people are going to have their broadband experiences improved—cheaper prices and faster speeds. They do not want an extension of hours, because they know they cannot justify denying Tasmanians. They know they cannot justify denying Western Australians, and they know—

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They can interject all they want. They want to hide from the fact that Mr Abbott gave them one mission only: demolish the NBN. They want to make sure that those customers in Tasmania have their prices soar and their speeds reduced. The hours needed to finish this debate are critical. Fundamentally, as my colleague Senator Ludwig has indicated, Telstra shareholders want an end to the farce of this parliament. They want an end to your filibustering, they want an end to the uncertainty you have been hanging over their heads for 12 months. You have filibustered your way through the parliament. You have not even allowed bills to be debated. This extension of hours is vital to end the uncertainty that you have been creating for Telstra shareholders. Your conduct in this chamber is disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful. You have sought to increase, at every stage, the uncertainty for Telstra shareholders. The board of Telstra wants to bring on the extraordinary general meeting to vote on the deal, and you are stopping it. Those opposite, by opposing this extension of hours, are continuing to hang this uncertainty over Telstra shareholders’ heads, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If ever the Australian people wanted a display of a government in disarray, they have seen it early this afternoon in a motion moved by the Manager of Government Business in the Senate. This is a government that has set a very, very short timetable for parliamentary sittings. This is a government that had the National Broadband Network legislation on the red—which is, for want of a better term, the Senate agenda—on Monday. We were ready to debate it on Monday, with Senator Birmingham making a very, very good contribution at 10 am on Monday morning. Why was the bill not progressed?

Senator Conroy comes into this place and asserts that the bill was not progressed because of opposition filibustering. That is false, untrue and incorrect. It was the Labor government that pulled this legislation off the agenda. They refused to continue the debate. We now know why. It was because they were in disarray. They had to get these 25 pages of amendments, which were dumped on the table at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon. The Greens and others who always say that this Senate is the place that ought to analyse matters very carefully—that we have to exercise due diligence—are now prepared for these 25 pages of amendments to be rushed through this place without proper analysis and examination.

Some of the matters in these amendments are of considerable note. Indeed, it was once again interesting to hear from the minister responsible for this debacle, Senator Conroy, what a Telstra board wanted and what other people wanted. Telstra and Optus are both on the record as having indicated a deep concern with division 16 amendments, which essentially opened the way for the NBN to almost entirely cut out the ACCC from supervising some of its most important operating decisions. Telstra and Optus are expressing concern. So why does the government want to rush this through? It is so that the community and the companies will not have the capacity to inform the Australian people—especially the crossbenchers—of their concerns about these amendments. They want it rushed through so that there cannot be a genuine and proper community debate.

We in this opposition are concerned that the NBN, like pink batts, like border protection, like everything this government touches, has turned from gold to dust. That is what happens with this government. No matter what it touches, it ends up as a debacle. Here it had legislation pulled that was allegedly so important, and now there are 20-plus pages of amendments that we are supposed to deal with in less than 24 hours. I wonder if the delay in the government putting these amendments on the table is because it needed the permission of the Australian Greens to be able to progress and proceed with these amendments. I do not know what the reason is, but it is a disgrace, and it shows a government that, might I add, cannot even keep the numbers that it is required to in this chamber. The government has one Labor senator in this place as we speak. That is how importantly it treats the Senate. That is the sort of disrespect with which it treats the Senate. And yet it says we have to somehow take our responsibilities seriously. If the government took its responsibilities seriously, it might actually have two senators in their places as it is required to—and it is good to see a Labor senator finally strolling in to achieve that outcome.

The amendments are of fundamental importance to the NBN. We as an opposition are entitled to examine them very carefully and very closely. Another of the matters that the amendments will deal with is that the ACCC will lose any power over bundling of services by the NBN. The ACCC will lose any power over cross-subsidisation of services by the NBN. These are amendments of great and considerable moment, and this is a Labor Party and Greens alliance that now says, ‘Forget about the scrutiny; we just want to ram it through.’

We have seen a government in disarray over the last few years. Just when you think it might get better, it just gets worse. It unravels even further. The minister says that the NBN is providing double the download and faster speeds. It is a pity the minister cannot do that for himself in his own portfolio and come with these amendments in a timely period to this parliament so that we can actually examine them. Basically, I think he wants the broadband speed of just a dump and run and not to be concerned with the consequences. Well, we will not cop it on behalf of the Australian people. The Australian people are now finding out every single day about this broadband debacle. Whilst it sounded good in theory during the last election campaign, as they are analysing it day by day they realise the huge faults with it. Indeed, these 20-plus pages of amendments considerably negate that which was in the original legislation. That is the concerning aspect of this. The government announces legislation with a whole host of fanfare and says, ‘This is good legislation that ought to be passed.’ It then takes it off the Notice Paper, has to give us 25 pages of amendments and then says it has to be rushed through.

This is a government that went to the Australian people saying ‘no carbon tax’. We are now going to be subjected to a carbon tax if it has its way. This is the same government that told us, ‘If there is a carbon tax, there will be huge tax deductions for average Australians,’ and it ran that line for a week. Today, courtesy of the newspapers, we now know that it will not be doing that either. That is why we as an opposition know that this government has form on misleading the Australian people day after day, week after week, month after month. The longer this government goes for, the more the Australian people are asking about its integrity.

This is just another example of why those questions are right and proper and should be asked. So we as an opposition will be opposing this legislation, and I can indicate to the government: if they want legislation by exhaustion, be our guest, because we will join them hour after hour, day after day if need be, because this is a matter of great moment. This should have gone to a Senate committee for the consideration of these 25 pages of amendments. If the government and the Greens conspire to ensure that that does not occur, we will undertake a very close examination—a very, very detailed examination—to ensure that the necessary matters are fully ventilated. But the proper way to do this would be to refer these pages and pages of amendments to the Senate committee for due consideration and report back to the Senate before we deal with the legislation. The opposition will be opposing the motion.

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

I will speak very briefly on this motion because I think Senator Ludwig outlined the case for urgency, at least. Here we are at the end of March. For some reason which I still do not completely understand, the government scheduled a five-week recess in April, so the next time we convene will be for the budget in May.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Seven weeks.

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

No, the recess is five weeks. People talking of seven weeks are including this week and budget week. But we do—numbers aside—agree with the government that there are a whole heap of processes that are held back behind the passage of this legislation, which, let us recall, is the enabling legislation around the NBN. This infrastructure project is being built in the absence of the kinds of provisions that these bills seek to introduce—and that means a company working in a legislative vacuum, trying to put together an arrangement with Telstra for taking on their assets and their traffic.

The only thing I suppose that I should agree with Senator Abetz on in his comments a few moments ago is that these amendments are of substance. I am not going to stand here this morning and say that they are inconsequential and we should just wave them through. Senator Abetz and Senator Fifield before him spoke about how they would be here to provide scrutiny and analysis of these amendments. We will be here as well. I am not proposing legislation by exhaustion or by attrition; I think that is an extraordinarily poor way to pass bills. But we will be here for as long as this debate takes because I do agree that these amendments have substance.

I will put on the record at this stage, without going into too much detail because I gather we are going to have plenty of time to go into the detail, that some of the amendments have been put forward as a result of negotiations with a large number of participants in the industry and are things that the Senate committee called for and that the Australian Greens have been calling for. Let us remember that this has not just happened overnight. There was an exposure draft of this bill in the public domain for a long period of time. A number of very important issues were resolved out of that process of delivering an exposure draft and now we have the legislation that is before us. Serious concerns were raised about the bill inside and outside of the committee process and now we have a package of amendments that attempts to address many of those concerns.

I will acknowledge that new concerns have been raised as a result of the package of amendments we have in front of us now, but it looks as though we are going to have plenty of time to debate those in detail. So we will be supporting this hours motion and I look forward to not being here on the weekend.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When will the Greens and the Independents realise that they are yet again being dudded by this government and by the incompetence of the minister in charge of communications? Can I take the Senate back to the last sitting days of last year. After doing nothing for most of the year because of the very light legislative program, suddenly in the last three or four days of the sitting, when everyone was looking forward to getting home for Christmas—plans had been made—we had this parliament sitting day and night to deal with that package of NBN legislation, not the one before us now but a different set of very important bills that were being amended as we were speaking in the chamber.

Yet here we are in exactly the same position now. We came into this chamber on Monday to debate the bill and to deal with it through the committee stage. We were here ready to go and then Senator Ludlam got up in his speech on the second reading and let the cat out of the bag that the bill we were then all debating, the one we had in front of us, the written legislation we had on our desks as we debated, was not going to be the bill that we were dealing with, that there were going to be pages and pages and volumes and volumes of amendments. So what we were debating on Monday was just not the bill that the government was eventually going to ask us to debate. And here we are on the last day of sitting before a five-week break—

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Six weeks.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will take your word, Senator Humphries. Here we are with the longest break in this period of the year that there has ever been with any government. We have a six-week break and we are now in the last couple of hours of this time before the break dealing with 25 pages of most complex amendments to a most complex piece of the discussion.

This did go to a committee. Senator Birmingham, Senator Fisher and I were on that committee, as was Senator Ludlam. The majority report came out and of course the majority of the committee is government-Green alliance, so they recommended you go ahead, with some amendments. The coalition senators had a different view. The hearing of this legislation typically showed that Senator Conroy’s legislation was full of holes; it did not hold water. The deals that had been made with Telstra and others were not accounted for in this legislation. So we had to have a whole new set of amendments. I have not seen the amendments. They only came out yesterday afternoon. I have been doing other things. I have not had a chance to look at them. I assume the other parties have, the stakeholders, but I certainly have not had an opportunity to deal with them. I hear around the traps that a couple of the so-called stakeholders are not very happy about the ability of NBN to enter into the retail market. Who knows? Already Telstra have said that their extraordinary general meeting that was going to be held by 1 July has now been postponed to September. From what I hear around the traps, it may not even be approved then. It simply demonstrates the fact that this whole NBN fiasco is just that, a fiasco. It is in shambles and as each day goes by people are more and more understanding that this is legislation that is completely wrong, is not well thought through and does not achieve the results that anyone thought, and yet we are going to have to try and debate it in the next couple of days.

I am surprised that the Greens are going along with this. I happen to know that, at the end of last year just before the Victorian elections, Senator Brown did not want to hang around the chamber because he wanted to get around and bask in the glory of the Greens victory in the Victorian election. Remember that?

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

That did not work out so well.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He had to stay here, but he made sure that he was able to get there.

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

He may have been thankful.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As Senator Birmingham says, he may have been thankful, because all of the bluff and bluster by Senator Brown on how well the Greens were going to do in the Victorian elections turned into nothing. The Greens actually went backwards in the Victorian election and I suggest that is probably what will happen on Saturday in New South Wales as well. But I know Senator Brown will be very keen to get there in the possibility of the Greens taking a couple of seats off Labor in Sydney. If they do, Senator Brown will not want to be stuck in this chamber here in Canberra away from the TV cameras when he could be down there.

All the pious arrangements the Greens made with Ms Gillard to guarantee her power—about openness, accountability, making parliament work and having the right sorts of times for debate—all of that piety from the Greens has really turned into abject and absolute hypocrisy. Here we are again: on a day when we not even supposed to be dealing with government business we have a couple of hours left to deal with some of the most important legislation that the Australian taxpayers will have to pay for in many a day. We are dealing with $55 billion of taxpayers’ money and, yet again, as we did at the end of last year, we are going to rush through these 25 pages of complex amendments in a few hours. Certainly we are going to sit tomorrow. As far as I am concerned, we will be here Saturday and Sunday too, because the people of Australia deserve to have someone to look after their interests and the $55 billion of taxpayers’ money that the Greens and the Labor Party are going to spend.

I do not want to be all criticism of the Greens because Senator Ludlam has some expertise on this. He makes no bones of the fact that the Greens, as the ultra-Socialist party, want the NBN to be government controlled and owned, and to stay that way permanently. I suspect, if Senator Ludlam had his way, that every business in Australia would be owned by the government as well—that is the ultimate socialist platform. Certainly, as far as the NBN goes, Senator Ludlam makes no secret of that, but he has pointed out some of the stupidities. He has joined with us in exposing the fact that there will be no competition in this wholesale delivery of services. People are starting to wake up to that. The last time we did not have competition, back in the old Telecom and PMG days, we had an awful telephone system because there was no incentive to take the latest technology.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young, you may not have been alive when Telecom ran the telephone system, but I can guarantee you the system is light years in advance now of what it was then. Why? Because Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and all of the other telcos have been competing—they have been getting the latest technology and keeping prices down. But here we are going to have a government monopoly, and what incentive will it have to move forward later?

I see that Senator Ludwig is getting anxious about my speaking on the motion to extend the sitting hours that is before the chamber. He was not quite so concerned about Senator Conroy getting up and giving a 10-minute speech about the NBN bills. I do not want to do that. I just want to point out how inappropriate it is that even I have not yet had an opportunity to look at this very serious legislation. I claim no expertise on the NBN, but I have tried to very follow it through in its various forms over the last three or four years. I have not even seen the amendments—yet I am supposed to vote on this sometime in the next day or so?

Telstra is not going to make its final decision until September. Why do we have to deal with this today? Why not leave it until the June sitting? We still have five, six or seven months before Telstra is going to make any decision, and from what you hear around the traps Telstra is getting a bit uneasy about it all. So what is the hurry? Why deal with this now? Why not leave it until the June session and give us an opportunity to seriously look at the amendments? Give the stakeholders more of an opportunity to find the flaws because I guarantee that they will find flaws, as they have done with every piece of legislation that Senator Conroy has introduced. Senator Ludlam just said that he is not convinced that all 25 pages of amendments—which I was led to believe that he and the government put together—are true. I appeal to Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding: what is the rush about this? Why are we doing now what we did at the end of the session last year? Remember last year? We rushed the NBN bills through. We sat all hours of the day and night. We are doing the exact same thing now. When are you ever going to learn that this mob in the Labor Party just take you for fools. They just dud you all the time. They pull the wool over your eyes and we get very poor legislation. The Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate has indicated our position on this motion and I support that position.

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

This is an outrageous attempt by the government that shows their utter incompetence in managing the legislative agenda and in the management of this issue. The two bills that are the crux of the reason the government is seeking extended hours were first introduced into the House of Representatives on 25 November last year. Senator Conroy put these bills into the public arena on 25 November and they were then introduced into the lower house. There have been changes to one of them since then, but they passed the House on 1 March this year. The government have had ample opportunity to get their house in order and have failed miserably to do so. We have seen just in the last 24 hours the government attempt significant rewriting of their own legislation. These delays to the debate, as Senator Fifield and Senator Abetz have eloquently outlined, are not of the opposition’s making. We have been ready to debate these bills at any moment over the last few days. We came here on Monday morning ready to debate the bills, but they were taken off the agenda by the government. The government then spent days messing around, drafting amendments to these bills to fix problems in their own legislation. These are problems that they have had not just days or weeks to fix but months to fix. They have had months to fix these problems because, I repeat, these bills were first introduced into the parliament in November of last year.

Now they come in here at the eleventh hour on the Thursday, when usually there is only a limited amount of time available for government business. They have known all week that if they let it drag on until Thursday there would be problems, but they have come in here and pleaded for extra hours, to keep us here tonight and to keep going tomorrow, to rush through consideration not of bills that have been examined by the committee previously, not of bills that were examined by the House of Representatives previously but of fundamentally different bills. They are fundamentally different because there are 28 pages of amendments to these bills—not just a couple of amendments but 28 pages worth. Within that there would be a couple of hundred or more changes to these bills. There are hundreds of amendments that they now suddenly want all senators to get their heads around.

Let us remember the significance of this. This is a $50 billion project, all of it funded one way or another by taxpayer debt, a debt that will be owned by the Commonwealth in some form, and they want us to rush it through just in the next few hours. They want us to rush it through tonight or tomorrow. They want us to rush it through without some decent consideration by the industries and sectors that will be impacted.

What should happen, as Senator Abetz rightly pointed out, is that this amendment should be referred back to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee. The committee that has looked at these bills should look at the amendments and should provide the key stakeholders—in particular, the telecommunication companies—with the opportunity to express their views. The government have got these bills so fundamentally wrong to date that there is absolutely no guarantee that there are not further mistakes in the 28 pages of hundreds of amendments that they are now trying to put through. If the Senate lets them get away with this and we spend the next couple of days debating these amendments and shunting this bill through, we will find that there are further mistakes, that the government have got it wrong in other ways. Then we will be back here again, at some stage, fixing the flawed agenda of the government.

These amendments are substantive enough that they should go back to the committee and they should go back because there are genuine concerns. The model that they are proposing is utterly different from the wholesale only model of the NBN that Senator Conroy has proclaimed it to be all along. The model that these amendments and this legislation will allow for will see NBN Co. selling services directly to large customers. In doing that, ultimately, if we let them get away with it, we will create yet another large, vertically integrated monopoly. If we let the government get away with it, they are going to recreate something that looks exactly like the company they are spending billions of dollars trying to dismantle—namely, of course, the old Telstra.

The telecommunication companies are expressing their concern about these amendments and, in particular, as Senator Abetz highlighted, the division 16 amendments. These amendments would largely cut the ACCC out from having input into the operating decisions on price discrimination, bundling of services and points of interconnection. This will utterly change the way NBN Co. and its operations are regulated. The amendments would utterly change it from the legislation that I spoke on in this chamber on Monday—legislation that the House has already considered—and utterly change it from the legislation that the Senate committee has considered.

So I urge the crossbenchers to recognise that these are fundamentally significant changes, that it would be grossly irresponsible of the Senate to not allow stakeholders the opportunity, firstly, to have some time to digest these changes, which were dumped on the Senate and the rest of the world only last night. We must give people the opportunity to digest hundreds of pages and, secondly, give them the opportunity to comment on them, to have some input into the decent process that the Senate is meant to pride itself on. Thirdly, we must allow the Senate committee to come back and provide the kind of rational, considered thought that led the government to adopt these 28 pages of hundreds of amendments in the first place.

If we do not do that, we are just allowing the government to treat the Senate with contempt, the telecommunication industry with contempt and, ultimately, the Australian consumer public with contempt. They will be saddled with not just the $50 billion of government debt for this NBN but all of the other problems that will come with a flawed process that allows NBN Co. to operate in a space that the government says it will not be in, yet which this legislation allows. It will be in the retail space, which will see the emergence of a company operating in a far more vertically integrated way than the government claims it wants, in doing so distorting and destroying the telco market in the future. The government should be willing to let consideration happen. There is a real question as to what they have to hide. I would urge the crossbenchers, if they believe in the primacy of the Senate and the primacy of the parliament, to reject these extended hours, to refer these amendments to a committee. We will come back. We will come back in a few weeks if you want. Senators may not like it, but let’s give it decent consideration rather than just trying to rush it through a few days.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Ludwig’s) be agreed to.