Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I am prepared, Senator, to actually have a look at the project. I will come to some of the issues about the project in my home state in a moment, because I have actually been out and had a discussion with some of the people who are on the line, and who have not been told the information and have not been given details of how this might work. But they have been impacted, and they have seen some of the waste already that has been incurred in the construction of stage 1 of the process.

For example, one constituent of mine, who has a lot of rock in the front of his yard, required an excavator to excavate the trench for it. That is no big deal, I suppose. You would expect an excavator to come in and do that sort of work; it is heavy work. But what does NBN Co. do? They go an hour and a half down the road. They hire an excavator without a driver—so they hire a dry excavator. Then they have to find a driver. And it is something in the order of 260 bucks an hour by the time they have got the equipment and the personnel they need; yet the same unit could be hired locally for about 100 bucks. So there is waste already in the implementation and rollout of this project, and it costs about $1,000 to run this line in to one resident. Those costs are going to occur; I understand that. But there should be some scrutiny of the process, and that is what the opposition is looking at—as part of our duties, our responsibilities, as an opposition.

Senator Carol Brown asked earlier: what would the business case provide? It would provide some of those answers that the taxpayers are looking for. It would provide a real opportunity for the opposition—and, if the government members were doing their job as well as they could, for them, because they would also be looking for some scrutiny into this process too. It is just as much the government members’ duty as it is the opposition’s duty to scrutinise this project, to ensure that taxpayers are getting value for money. It is just as much the responsibility of the government members to do that.

The government members talk about the number of inquiries that we have held as part of this process. Why aren’t they after this information? Why don’t they want to know? But they have been told by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard: ‘Don’t rock the boat. Just wander along; follow us like zombies—you’ll be right. Just trust us.’ Yet, when you go through the list of projects—and I did not even mention the mining tax.