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

It could have been interrupting anything, I guess. It was far more likely to be interrupting the minister’s soccer viewing. So the minister has his implementation study. Given that it is canvassing all of these issues—pricing, probity, delivery to rural and regional Australia, cabling, aerial deployment, shareholding, pricing; you name it, it is canvassed in the implementation study—I assume it was a large truck that rolled up to Senator Conroy’s door at six o’clock that Friday night to deliver him the implementation study.

I can tell the Senate what would make life easier for Senator Conroy and make it easier to digest his implementation study, and that would be for him to release it instantly. If he were to release it instantly, I can tell you that there are many people on this side of the chamber, many people on the crossbenches, many people in the telecommunications sector, many business analysts and many reporters who would all love to help Senator Conroy assess the validity of his implementation study. But, most importantly, we would all love—particularly those of us who are asked to make judgments on significant and important legislation like this—to know whether it all stacks up, whether it will all work out or whether it is just going to go the way of National Broadband Network stage 1. Eventually, after millions of dollars have been spent on consultants, after the government has built up expectations throughout the community, after the government has baffled investment in so many other areas of the communications sector—because nobody wants to act, believing that the government is going to come charging through like a herd of elephants and trample all over this sector—we want to know whether it is going to stack up, whether it is actually deliverable, whether Australians will take it up, at what price it is going to have to be subsidised and whether indeed the private sector investment that the implementation study says is needed to make this happen will occur.

We want to know the answers to all of those questions because we are trying to take a responsible approach from this side of the chamber. We are trying to assess whether or not what the government says it can achieve by this can be achieved by this before we go and give it a blank cheque. This bill is effectively a blank cheque to the minister and the ACCC to tear apart the structure of Telstra, to potentially jeopardise the delivery of wireless services in Australia for years to come and to do so without having provided us with the answers to any of the fundamental questions. I and the rest of the opposition will continue to argue against this until such time as Senator Conroy comes into this place, answers questions and gives us his implementation study, rather than continuing to bat them away, saying it is in the never-never somewhere.