Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications. Will the minister inform the House how ensuring the National Broadband Network project is executed as efficiently as possible and will deliver value for money for taxpayers?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. The government is committed to ensuring the NBN is delivered quickly, cost-effectively, at least cost to taxpayers and affordably for consumers, and we are going about this in a businesslike way. We are conducting now a thorough cost-benefit analysis, being dealt with by an independent panel headed by Dr Mike Vertigan. It will report in the middle of the year and that will inform the roll out of the project. That is in marked distinction to the Labor Party who, as we know, committed to a single access technology—fibre to the premises—without any cost-benefit analysis, all done on the back of a beer coaster on a VIP flight from Sydney to Brisbane.

We know that a Conrovian fog has fallen over the Labor Party which prevents them from acting in a rational economic manner. It causes them to deny the budget realities, the consequences of their wastefulness, the $667 billion of debt we are headed to without any change. But the fog sometimes breaks. I say with respect to the honourable member that I come not to embarrass the member for Fraser but to praise him, for I am very concerned, as we all are, that the Conrovian nonsense he is forced to spew out occasionally nowadays will live after him, but the wisdom and economic rationality will be buried in his bones, unless we draw people's attention to it. You can imagine the thought reform that the member for Fraser has had to have. You can imagine the Conrovian electrodes going onto him, as they give him another jolt to stop him being rational. You can imagine him coming out of the bunker shaking and spouting nonsense about 'no budget crisis and everything is okay'. Imagine the electricity bill of that exercise; imagine the carbon emissions.

It is extraordinarily wasteful but every now and then you see that it is very hard to cause somebody who is highly intelligent to be stupid all of the time. It really is. Even the Labor Party is unable to do that. We know they regret it. They must always be saying, 'If only we'd got him from the AWU, not the ANU!' Only a couple of weeks ago he said on the radio here in Canberra, talking about the budget:

I think infrastructure is a good thing, but I do see a risk that they are returning to the old pork-barrelling model in which you do not do proper cost-benefit analysis. What model was that? That was the Conrovian model. I can understand him being apprehensive. If I hung around with the people he does, I would be very worried about that sort of thing.