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

I rise to conclude the debate. I want to thank all those who have made a contribution. I did have a quite lengthy response, going through some of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (National Broadband Network) Bill 2008, but due to the time I will restrict my remarks to just responding to a number of individual queries.

Senator Birmingham, the new senator for Optus, ran all of the Optus-G9 lines about the process. Senator Ronaldson stood up and, surprisingly, ran all of the Telstra lines. There is only one problem: usually a party only has one position. You cannot actually have both. I invite you to have a conversation and decide which team you are barracking for, because you cannot actually barrack for both of them at the same time. It does look a little inconsistent. Senator Boswell became the senator for OPEL.

Senator Barnaby Joyce decided to join the debate, and I did enjoy his sterling defence of the Communications Fund. It was nothing to do with this bill, but it was a sterling defence of the fund that he himself, in public, described as a slush fund. If you want to talk about the Communications Fund, we look forward to that debate, because Senator Barnaby Joyce willingly, openly and gleefully described the Communications Fund as nothing more than a slush fund. The Liberal Party conceded it to him because they wanted his vote, but he folded on the sale of Telstra, so it was disappointing. After promising not to sell Telstra, Senator Joyce, you broke your word to the people of Queensland and you are now paying the consequence. But that is something for your conscience to live with.

Probably the most disappointing part for Senators Boswell and Joyce is that they did not have the courage to stand up to Senator Minchin and the Liberal Party over their proposal, their quite far-sighted proposal, in the Page foundation report, to build a fibre-to-the-node network—in fact a fibre-beyond-the-node network—in regional Australia. If only you had stuck to your guns, if only Senator Nash and Senator Joyce, who helped write that report, had stuck to their guns and stood up to the Liberal Party at the time, you might have had a telecommunications policy going into the last election to be proud of, not one about which Bruce Scott has said, ‘Thank goodness you got rid of OPEL.’ ‘Thank goodness’!—your own side is celebrating the fact that the OPEL contract did not go ahead. So the National Party did not have the courage to stand up to the former government. And the dinosaurs are slowly disappearing—you will not get a chance to vote for the National Party in the next election. There is some new conservative party you are working on. Senator Joyce, I am not sure whether you are going to be in the Lib-Nats, the Nat-Libs, the Conservatives or whatever.