Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to add a couple of comments to those of Senator Minchin and Senator Lundy, having had a little bit of time to examine the work that the Auditor-General has produced. As always, it is a valuable if carefully worded insight into the process. The public was given very little insight into the original RFP that occurred, starting at the beginning of 2008. It was, as these sorts of processes go, I think, relatively watertight in terms of the amount of information that came out, the kinds of agreements that the proponents were required to sign up to and the fact that the public had very little idea of what kind of work was going on. So it may have been a valuable exercise for the government to test the market and get a sense of what kind of capacity the industry could provide, but as far as the public were concerned I think they were very much in the dark at the time as to what sort of proposal might eventually emerge.

It was really interesting to hear Senator Minchin’s comments on the fact that this document exposes a certain amount of helter-skelter policy making on the run because as the picture became more clear as to what the industry was going to be able to provide in response to the RFP the goalposts began to move. We did not realise this until after the original RFP was terminated and the minister took his press conference with the Prime Minister and the finance minister saying, ‘Actually the goalposts have not just moved, they have multiplied by a factor of 10, and we are going to take this network all the way to the home.’

The Greens support for the broadbrush approach is on the record, partly because it was a model that we have been proposing for quite some time because it is one way of getting the wholesale architecture of the National Broadband Network back into public hands from where it should never have been privatised. Our opposition to the full privatisation of Telstra is also a matter of record. But this gives us a real window into the government’s thinking at the time that the original RFP was being undertaken. I would not use some of the language of Senator Minchin, whose opposition to all things connected to broadband and Minister Conroy is very clearly and firmly on the record, but there are some real irregularities here. I think this is a pretty obvious account of results that surprised the department—and surprised the government on the way through. That was one of the reasons that we saw such an unexpected outcome.

I am interested to know just how keenly Senator Minchin plans on pursuing these issues because, as far as the public and the parliament is concerned, unless I am mistaken this is the end of the matter. This is the last that we will be given on that RFP process; there will be no further records or documentation of the government’s thinking or the advice that it received, or any of the positions that were put to it by the proponents.

This was a matter that I discussed yesterday when we were debating the Finance and Public Administration References Committee’s report into matters of public interest immunity. So it is these very documents that the government was using as the basis for the decision that eventually came out about scaling the National Broadband Network up by a factor of 10 that the parliament is still not able to access. The minister has told us that it is all commercial in confidence: ‘You have to trust us. The Senate cannot have that material.’ So we need to rely on this obviously very thorough and very diligent but very short report from the National Audit Office.

That is where the matter will rest unless of course one or both of the major parties revisits the deadlock that the Senate finds itself in by requesting that those documents be made available for the public. In the event that the Senate does not intend to press its case, there is a proposition now on the table for an independent arbiter to assess public interest immunity claims, including claims like that blocking the production of the documents on a $4½ billion National Broadband Network. Now while that proposal has been suspended we will not know what the thinking was behind that beyond what has been produced in this document unless we see some movement from either of the major parties.

Quite frankly, it is all very well for Senator Minchin to stand up and express outrage at the lack of transparency and at the process that was afoot at the time being full of irregularities and being unconscionable, but unless he is prepared to stand up for those principles, the government will not be handing any documents over anytime soon. I invite Senator Minchin, in the absence of any moves towards transparency by the government, to perhaps revisit the work that his colleagues have done in that finance and public administration inquiry so that we can see this deadlock broken. If it is not appropriate for the Senate to receive the documents upon which these decisions were made, particularly given some of the concerns that have been raised by the Auditor-General in this case, then we should hand that decision to an umpire and then respect the outcomes of those judgements made by an independent arbitrator. A similar system has operated in New South Wales. Although it is a system that we could improve upon here, there is no reason why the Senate could not implement a very similar instrument here with those improved safeguards and improved accountability mechanisms so that these deadlocks do not occur in the future.

Until the opposition swings behind such a common-sense proposal, I am going to be treating the kind of outrage that we saw expressed by Senator Minchin just before with a great degree of scepticism. He has the means at hand to obtain the documents that the Senate has been seeking for nearly a year now. Otherwise, I think it is probably time to just sit down or admit that you are really only in it for political purposes to try and block the rollout of the NBN. That is certainly not the position that the Greens have taken. We are up for full accountability and disclosure. We would like these documents produced in the public interest and, if it is not in the public interest for them to be disclosed, then we would like to see that put to the test. We would like to see that conjecture by Minister Conroy put to the test and get an independent opinion on that. Those mechanisms are available to the Senate if it chooses them.