Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Shame indeed. This comes on top of its regulations exempting the NBN from scrutiny through the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works. You would have to ask why this government fears scrutiny so much. What has it got to hide? Why does it fear scrutiny? That is what we want to know. Yesterday, the Australian Financial Review summed up the government’s position:

The government should have nothing to fear from such transparency. If the project is the no-brainer the government claims it to be, it will have no trouble passing. The suspicion is that the government knows the NBN will pass no such scrutiny, and is nervous about its capricious policy-making being exposed.

We all know what happens when the government undertakes its capricious policy-making routine. We have had the pink batts, and they were a burning success. We have had the school halls. I remember in the member for Lyne’s electorate the Hastings Primary School was to get a $150,000 COLA for the cost of a million dollars. That was a great success; that was capricious policy making.

They spent $2.4 billion on pink batts, there was a $2 billion blow-out on the school halls program and now they are going to spend $43 billion. What are they going to say? They are going to say, ‘Trust me.’ ‘Trust me,’ they are saying. ‘We know what’s good for you. We know you don’t need competition. We know that we can manage this program properly, even though we’ve stuffed up the pink batts, we’ve ruined the school halls program, we made a mistake with the Green Loans program and we’ve had to restructure virtually all our environmental programs. We’ve had the computers in schools program go over budget.’ Everywhere you turn, they are policymaking disaster. There was the failure of the GroceryWatch website. There was the disaster of Fuelwatch. They are a policymaking disaster zone and yet they are going to spend $43 billion without a cost-benefit analysis and ask the Australian people to trust them. I know the members on this side of the parliament certainly do not trust this government, and we know the Australian people have lost confidence in this government. It is this House that stands between the Australian people and an absolute financial debacle that our grandkids will be paying back for years and years and years.

One of the other things that is really concerning to me as the shadow minister for regional communications—and out in the regions many people are on lower incomes than those in the larger metropolitan centres—is that this policy is actually becoming discriminatory. The government is imposing a postmaster-general type monopoly and effectively pushing up prices for broadband. What is that going to mean for affordability for people? It will mean low-income earners whose taxes are subsidising this white elephant are not going to be able to afford to connect to it. The figures from the ABS show that just 43 per cent of households earning under $40,000 a year access the internet at home. Those households will be paying with their taxes for Labor’s cost overruns, they will be paying for Labor’s inefficiencies and they will be paying for those people who can afford to access the internet. It will be the low-income earners who are actually cross-subsidising the high-income earners who will be able to take advantage of this situation.

Let’s have a look at Tasmania for a moment. One of the things you note when you look at every offer out there in ‘commercial land’—as opposed to la-la land, which the minister works in—is that every offer out there is price based. They are all very much commodity based, looking at the price point to try and attract business. But what do we see with the NBN in Tasmania? You can get 100 megabits for $139.95 with a 200 gigabit per month download limit. So what we see is $139.95. Are people earning under $40,000 a year going to spend $139.95 to take advantage of 100 megabits per second and a 200 gigabit download? I do not think so. So we have a situation where the market is demanding cheaper prices. The statistics are showing reducing prices for internet services, and what does the government’s strategy require? In order to be successful it needs growth in the real value of internet services, and that is not happening out there in the market. You can see by the rollout in Tasmania that people are not rushing to this product. The providers are not getting the market penetration that they would want, and I think that is one of the reasons for all this secrecy. They can see as this process is rolling out, as this infrastructure is being rolled out, that it is a market flop. It is a market flop and they do not want to subject it to the Productivity Commission’s review. They do not want to have third-party oversight because the writing is already on the wall. If you cannot sell it in Tasmania, how could you possibly sell it in Broome? If you cannot sell it in Tasmania, how could you possibly sell it in Weipa? Why are the people in Tasmania so averse to taking up a new ‘miracle product’, the product that everyone was going to beat the government’s door down to get?

It is absolutely outrageous. We are embarking on a project of huge magnitude. We are embarking on a project that is going to take our grandkids a generation to pay back, because no commercial investor is going to subscribe to this project to allow the government to keep its contribution to only $26 billion. No commercial investor is going to invest without a return. The government is totally incapable of showing where the revenues are going to come from to pay for the commercial component of this project, which means it is the poor old taxpayer who is going to have to pay. It is the poor old low-income earners who are going to miss out on cheap broadband. It is the Labor government up to its old tricks, proving it is just incapable of implementing policies on an effective and an efficient basis.

See this speech in context