Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Under standing order 74(5)(a), I seek an explanation from Senator Fifield as to why questions on notice to the Communications portfolio Nos 374, 375, 376, 377, 378 and 379, which I placed on notice on 16 February, remain unanswered.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My understanding is—I will have to take this on notice—that your office advised his office after question time had finished. The customs and the courtesies of this place are for good notice to be given to the ministers concerned. I would suggest, Senator O'Neill, that in future you respect the courtesies and the customs of this place in relation to giving good notice to the ministers to whom these questions are being addressed. It is clear that Labor today are playing stunts just to waste time. Sit down and let us get on with the business before the chamber. This is petulant and time wasting. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that whatever that was is going to suffice as the minister's response to my request for an answer.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, you didn't give him notice.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to place on the record that my office was directed to give—

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, you did not give him notice.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order, Senator McGrath! The senator has the right to be heard in silence. Senator O'Neill, please resume your seat.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On a point of order: you did not give the minister sufficient notice. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McGrath, that is not a point of order. It is a debating point.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Clearly, Madam Deputy President, the government have been found wanting once again with regard to providing information. Certainly, the direction to give notice to the senator was provided at a quarter to two, and I am very sorry that the minister did not actually have an answer prepared way ahead of this, seeing as this is a very, very important matter. Under standing order 74(5)(b), I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation provided by Senator McGrath.

Many of the questions that are put on notice by this opposition to this government continue to be treated with the contempt that we just saw in that display, that fit of pique, by the minister on duty here in the chamber, Senator McGrath. The reality is that these questions, which were put on notice over a month ago, go to important matters that Australians have the right to have information about. It goes to the attitude that this government has about having any accountability at all for the things that it says and that it promises to this country.

One of the questions that I put on notice was around deregulation with regard to the Department of Communications and the Arts. One of the things the government like to bang on about, day after day, week after week, is how fantastic they are at managing regulatory reform. Yet, when they were asked simple questions, or what I thought would have been relatively simple questions, such as, 'What is the Department of Communications and the Arts net progress, for 2016 to date, for regulatory savings and costs,' they were unable to answer that on the day, despite claiming to be the champions of deregulation. They are still unable to answer it, more than a month later. We asked:

How many regulatory and deregulatory proposals were costed in 2016.

Again, there is no answer. Here we are more than a month later, and there is still no response. We asked if the government might provide some accountability to the Australian people for this great agenda that they have with regard to deregulation, asking if they would be publishing a report to summarise what they have been doing with deregulatory and regulatory measures and their associated savings and costs that they were going to try and bank over 2016. No answer has been forthcoming, and today is 22 March.

I go to the Department of Communications and the Arts annual report 2015-16. On page 31, under 'Targets, measurement, results'—which gives the general reader the impression they are accountable for what they are doing—they claim, in black and white:

Our target is to reduce the burden of red tape and onerous regulation in the communications sector, including efforts to meet the Australian Government's commitment to reducing the costs of excessive regulation by $1 billion per year.

That is a pretty big claim. You would think, if they were making sincere and genuine efforts towards that end, they might have some numbers on hand and provide the information.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy President, on a point of order: I think Senator O'Neill may have misled the chamber. You said before that your office gave notice to Senator Fifield's office at a quarter to two. I have just checked with Senator Fifield's office; notice did not come in until three o'clock.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McGrath, I think that is a debating point.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government in their annual report indicate that they have initiatives to generate annual savings of $250 million for businesses and consumers in the communications sector. They said that their reforms were significant and that they were going to be able to achieve these savings. Yet, when asked for a cost assessment of their regulatory and deregulatory measures, they were unable to provide it. That is an indication not only of their failure to be transparent with the Australian people but also that they are making a mockery of the important processes of this Senate and the accountability that they should be able to manage when we go into estimates sessions.

There were other questions on two major matters that I know are of great interest to the Australian people, and one is in regard to Australia Post—again, with some need for detail. Australia Post provides a great and significant service to the country, but it is also quite a significant financial entity. Australia Post is responsible for providing a letter delivery service. But, as we have heard in a number of hearings over recent times, a diversification of that business has occurred with regard to parcel delivery. That is perhaps where Australians are really finding that service quite valuable, as things change. We know, though, that the valuation of Australia Post is of vital importance to Australia's national accounts figures and for Australians to understand what the value of that particular asset is. In one of these questions on notice, the minister was asked to confirm what the administered investment value of Australia Post was in the most recent annual report. But the department of communications were unable to provide an answer. Again, they have had that question for more than one month, since 16 February, and no response has been provided.

There is a particularly important dimension to the questions that were asked on notice by us in opposition, and that is in regard to the valuation of Australia Post and the change of that information from 2014-15 through to the current period. The valuation, of course, is a vital element of the government's accounting, and the figures that are here represented on an annual basis to make sure that the Australia people can see what is going on. The questions that we asked seem pretty innocuous to me and they seem like ones that should not be too difficult to answer.

With reference to that valuation of Australia Post, we asked further questions about when the most recent valuation of Australia Post was undertaken. We sought to ascertain by whom that valuation might have been undertaken. There was no information. It is a relatively reasonable request for information. It should have been something that the government were able to answer. When we asked for details about how long the valuation document was, they could not answer. We started to wonder if, indeed, there was a valuation document. We asked for the commencement date and the completion date of the processes that were to be provided. We asked for relevant contract notices, if there was indeed an independent valuation undertaken. None of that information was forthcoming on that day, and it still has not been provided to us here in the Senate. We wanted to know about how these figures informed the department's current financial statement. It is pretty well known to every small company across the country that you have your financial statements and you keep them in order and you have fair and reasonable valuations. This government, sadly, could not provide the answers to those questions.

Questions 376, 375 and 374 go to the NBN. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this matter, because this government has proven itself to fail on the three areas that it indicated it was going to be a success in terms of delivering the NBN. You might remember the mantra that they put out prior to the election: cheaper, faster and sooner. That was their promise on the NBN. Let us have a look at their record so far and why we should be paying particularly close attention to what they are doing with the accounts. The 'sooner' claim was made by Malcom Turnbull when he made the announcement that he was going to dismantle the proper rollout of fibre to all the premises, both businesses and homes. Malcom said that he would get it to Australians sooner by changing it to a multitechnology mix. Indeed, he made his commitment that by the end of 2016 Australians would have his cheaper, sooner, faster NBN. It is 2017, and I know that right around this country those who have received the NBN so far are extremely unhappy about the service that has been provided by the NBN to the node. I know that those who are waiting for it still do not have adequate information about what is going to come to them. The timelines are all over the place. The government are running and hiding from the commitments that Mr Turnbull made when he was the minister for communications and is failing to honour in his continuing role as the Prime Minister of Australia.

They failed on the 'sooner'. Let us have a look at their next promise. They said that they would deliver a 'faster' NBN. It is not faster, because it has not arrived in the time that they said, but it is not faster even if you do have it. Around the world, Australia's aspiration for a speed of 25 megabits down and five megabits up is a joke. If you offer it to people in any country around the world that has a decent NBN, they cannot believe that Australia is proceeding with this subpar, subgrade advance of what this government are determined to call a super-fast broadband. There is no way it is fast and there is no way it competes with our international competitors in the world economy. It is a fail for speed. We know that with fibre to the node you have got a fibre network that is based on the movement of information at the speed of light all the way to a corner near you. Then it hits a box on that corner and from that point it is a goat track to your home. That is the technology that Malcom Turnbull has delivered to large chunks of Australia with fibre to the node. He has failed with regard to speed tests on that network, and the further away your home is from the node, the worse the service that you get. It does not matter if you are running a very successful small business in a regional part of Australia, say down in the Riverina or where I come from on the Central Coast or in regional parts of Tasmania or Western Australia, it does not matter if you are an innovative business ready to do business, if you are more than a few hundred metres away from that node, the speed that you are going to get is totally inadequate. It will not help you grow your business, grow jobs and grow the wealth of the community in which you want to provide that service too.

We know that businesses are reporting left and right that the reliability of the particular version of the NBN that Mr Turnbull has decided is satisfactory for Australians is completely under par. There are businesses that are trying to make orders and do jobs and are finding that they are constantly losing their capacity to put those orders through, because their line is dropping out. That is the type of NBN that we have seen delivered thus far by the government.

Given the fact that Mr Turnbull has failed on the 'sooner' part and failed on the 'faster' speed part, we are entitled to pay close attention to what is happening with regard to the 'cheaper' claim that the government says that they could do. You might remember that they made a great deal when they were in opposition about $56 billion worth of investment in infrastructure for this country so that we could compete on an even playing field with our international competitors around the world and so that we could have access to education and access to business opportunities and access to health with a ubiquitous market where 100 megabits down and 25 megabits up would be guaranteed to all Australians. That they failed on, and they have not declared in any transparent way what they are doing with the real costs of the NBN. They said to the Australian people that they would invest $29 billion. Towards the end of last year the community and industry saw how bad the NBN rollout is. Nobody in the private sector wanted to invest in the NBN that Malcom Turnbull was delivering. So, instead of that, the government decided to put $20 billion more of Australian taxpayers' money in. It is now up to $49 billion on their watch. We have a lemon, rather than a ubiquitous, high-quality NBN rollout of genuinely fast broadband across this country.

The questions that I asked in the course of that estimates around in February went to the financial assets that were noted in the communication and arts annual reports of 2014 and 2015. In the 2015 report there was a valuation of the NBN Co as $7.708 billion. When we had a look at the 2015 figure revised in the next annual report, that figure was revised up to $8.5 billion. We asked the minister to confirm whether the $793 million upward adjustment was reflective of an independent review, which is referred to in the document on page 112, footnote No. 3. It states:

Administered investment valuation in the NBN Co Limited is based on its net assets balance with the property, plant and equipment adjusted for fair value and the discounting of leave and superannuation liabilities adjusted by applying the Government bond rate. These adjustments were required to reflect the NBN Co Limited at fair value in the financial statements. The impact of these adjustments was an increase of $1.046 billion at 30 June 2016 and an adjustment of $793 million to the net assets at 30 June 2015 totalling $8.501 billion. The 2015 amount reflects this adjustment. An independent review has been undertaken to ascertain the fair value of property, plant and equipment in June 2016.

The problem is we asked about that independent review, but, when it came to getting an answer about the nature of that independent review, what we heard was silence—at least that was the case until today, when we heard that extraordinary outburst when we asked for a reason why the answer has not been forthcoming so far.

We asked if the independent review to ascertain that fair value of NBN Co, which was undertaken in June 2016, had been made public. Was it available? Could a copy be provided to us so that we could actually read and understand what it is that the government is claiming is the value of the NBN. Why does it matter? It matters for those reasons that I articulated a little while ago. The government has been found to be completely out of touch with reality when it refers to its commitment to deliver the NBN sooner. The government has failed its own test to deliver a faster NBN. Faster delivery is certainly not the case. Australians are not getting what they thought they were going to get. That has been compromised by Malcolm Turnbull's multi-technology mix, which is compromising Australians' capacity.

We also fear, which is why we asked these questions, that Australians are getting a raw deal in terms of the money that is being expended on this lemon of an NBN. We are just simply asking for some transparency and accountability around what is going on with these valuations. I do not know about everyone else in this chamber, but it seems to me that a few billion dollars here or there matters quite a bit. One of the concerns we have with regard to this independent review is what the government's practices are in terms of its determination of what I asked the department do around the nature of this review. Is this a review that is undertaken every year, or is it just this year that they undertook it to make some adjustment that might make it look a little bit better? Everything else we see around NBN looks like a bit of a con, frankly. We are concerned that these numbers are part of that game of presenting one image about the NBN, when the reality behind it is something quite different.

We asked to find out if the contract notices for the independent review, which they claim is independent, could be provided. We have not heard a word about that, and we certainly have not seen those relevant contract notices. We wanted to know at whose direction the review was initiated. We have not had an answer to that. We wanted to know what entity conducted the so-called independent review. I fear that we might get answers that will not be at all satisfactory, and that the government is not committed to providing them in a transparent way but will rather mask what has been going on in this space. We asked how long the review was, we asked what date it was initiated and we asked when the minister might receive this independent review. Sadly, we still have no information at all about that.

We know from the history of the national broadband that this is one of the government's great failures. On 11 October, Malcolm Turnbull hailed the coalition's NBN as one of the 'great corporate turnarounds' in Australia's history. He did not really mean what it is that he has delivered. If by 'great turnaround' the Prime Minister means backflipping on every NBN promise made to the Australian people, falling short on every target and overseeing soaring complaints by our constituents, then, yes, he is correct: it is truly one of the most astounding turnarounds in Australia's history.

The government's litany of failures with regard to the NBN really is absolutely embarrassing for this nation. We had an opportunity under the Gillard government and under the leadership of Stephen Conroy to develop a ubiquitous, high-quality, genuinely superfast network around the country; sadly, what we have got under Malcolm Turnbull is a very sad reflection of that. Mr Turnbull promised that he would deliver the NBN for $29 billion. Under his watch—firstly, as the Minister for Communications responsible for setting the direction, and now as the Prime Minister responsible for accounting for where we are—that has blown out to $54 billion. That is a cool $25 billion that he got wrong. No wonder we are concerned about the reporting of the financial reports.

Add that to his $50 billion proposed corporate tax cuts, and you can see that this is a government that is not responsible with Australian taxpayer dollars and has wasted a fantastic opportunity to invest in genuine infrastructure and productivity gains for this country. It has been blown away by Malcolm Turnbull's amazing ego, which has allowed him to inflict on this country a second-rate, perhaps a third-rate, national broadband system that will not serve our purposes. We have got seven million Australians waiting for the NBN, despite passing the date that Mr Turnbull promised them that they would have it by—that is, the end of 2016. Day by day, the folly of this government's second-rate copper network is being exposed. That is why we should have answers to these questions. This government cannot be trusted on the NBN; it needs scrutiny. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.