Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Conroy knew, Senator Lundy knew, I knew—we all knew—that the only company that could ever implement this policy was in fact Telstra, because it was Telstra’s proposal to upgrade its network to a fibre-to-the-node network. The whole process of this tender—all the millions that all the other tenderers spent on it and all the money that the department spent on it—was always a waste and always a joke. The government should have been quite upfront and quite honest and said, ‘This is about upgrading the Telstra network; we will enter into negotiations with Telstra about how we do that in the best possible way and in the best interests of the taxpayers,’ and just got on with it. Instead, we went through this farce, this fiasco, that ended up with the debacle that we are aware of.

All through this report it is clear that the department and the minister were well aware that there would be literally billions of dollars in compensation payable to Telstra if anyone other than Telstra was selected as the tenderer. That was obvious to us—I as the shadow minister kept saying that—and the minister knew it. Of course, the ultimate farce of this whole process is that the only company that was ever going to be able to implement this policy, Telstra, was then excluded from the process. Why? Because it did not make a small business implementation plan a part of its submission. For goodness sake, this was a multibillion tender that we all knew only Telstra could implement and because of the process they constructed—