Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to take note of the answers given to questions today by Senator Conroy and Senator Chris Evans. These answers demonstrate that, when it comes to the big issues and when it comes to their massive expenditure, this government does not understand the detail of its own plans or policies. They have no idea how to administer them. They have no idea how they work. They simply waste taxpayers’ money time and time again and hurt the Australian public in the process.

With the release of the Auditor-General’s report yesterday we have seen yet more damning evidence that Senator Conroy and the government have messed up the implementation of the National Broadband Network. It was their big election policy promise. They promised at the time to build a $4.7 billion fibre-to-the-node network and they promised that construction would start within 12 months of their being elected. Instead, we saw delay upon delay upon delay in the way the network tender process was handled. We saw a blow-out in all of the costs related to that network tender process.

We have seen some $30 million of taxpayers’ money wasted by the tender process, a damning report from the Auditor-General and the government in a humiliating backdown saying it would not back down from a policy that it could not achieve but it would up the stakes—double or nothing; in fact, in this case it was 10 times or nothing. They turned it into a $43 billion promise to build a fibre-to-the-home network. That is right: they could not get a tenderer, they could not get the project off the ground to actually build fibre to the node in a $4 billion to $5 billion promise so they times it by 10, decided to roll it around the country and are going to spend $40 billion plus. It is unbudgeted and has no business plan. Quite clearly, this will end up being as unsuccessful as their first failed attempt and will waste many millions of dollars more of taxpayers’ money on lawyers, accountants, consultants and all of those people who did very well out of the tender process—everyone except the Australian taxpayer.

We have evidence within this that Senator Conroy, in promising they would deliver a successful tender right up until the time when it was revealed that they could not, in effect misled this house. He said, ‘We will announce a successful tenderer within the month,’ when he knew full well at that stage they had no capacity to announce a successful tenderer.

We then had Senator Evans having to come in here in a humiliating way at the end of question time and confirm that he too misled the house. Just yesterday he misled the house when he tried to tell the Australian people that 92 per cent of all households would be compensated under the government’s great big new tax, the emissions trading scheme. He said yesterday ‘92 per cent of all households’, claiming of course that basically everyone would be fully compensated. Well far from it that everyone will be fully compensated—far from it indeed. Under the government’s own rather dodgy estimates we will see at least half of all Australian households left worse off as a result of the big new tax, having to fork out more from their own pockets to maintain their standard of living and to pay for their electricity and for all of the consumer goods that that will flow through to.

This government does not know how it is administering its own policies. Senator Evans was deliberately misleading the house, attempting to mislead the Australian people or simply did not understand his own policy. That is the reason he was caught out today and had to come into this chamber and acknowledge that he said the wrong thing yesterday, that he got it wrong.

Then we have the Prime Minister himself being caught out. The Prime Minister in his usual morning television appearances tried to convince the Australian people that he understands the detail of the scheme. He said there would be a one-off adjustment to the price of consumer goods. What rot. If you are having a market system with a variable price for carbon, surely there will be a variable impact flowing through to the price of consumer goods. That is why the government has not promised an annual review of its compensation. It is yet another example of this government—Senator Conroy, Senator Evans and the Prime Minister—getting it wrong on the details of their big picture policies. (Time expired)