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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity (Senator Conroy) to question without notice asked by the opposition today, relating to the National Broadband Network.

I note that the opposition were the only people asking Senator Conroy any questions today. We asked Senator Conroy three very clear, focused questions relating to the NBN business plan. On the other side of the chamber, today was the ‘ABC question time’, the ‘anyone but Conroy question time’. We saw minister after minister after minister asked questions about the NBN but not one of those questions was directed towards the actual Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. In their desperation to try to build some sort of case to support their NBN, to try and justify why they are keeping its business plan secret from the Australian people, the government are turning to every other minister now because they know that Minister Conroy is not able to sustain the argument in this place, he is not able to actually build the case in the public arena, as to why this is $43 billion well spent, as to why this money should be tipped into this network without any cost-benefit analysis and without this parliament having the right, before voting on this critical legislation, to actually see the business plan that has been delivered to the government.

We are seeing a desperate government applying ever more desperate excuses for why they are covering their tracks on the NBN business plan. We know that the government have the document; we know that they got the 400-page document two weeks ago. The problem is that they keep tripping themselves up on their own stories. Back at Senate estimates Senator Conroy suggested that the document would never be released. But then two weeks ago when he received it, he said it would be released. And then last week the Prime Minister, rather unhelpfully for Senator Conroy, put a time line on it and said it would be released in December. Since then Senator Conroy has attempted to rewrite it, saying cabinet needs to ‘put a fine toothcomb through it’. Well, we all know what the fine toothcomb of this government looks like; it leaves nits and all sorts of un-niceties behind when it has been through any type of program, as we have seen quite clearly with home insulation, Green Loans, pink batts, Building the Education Revolution—you name it, their fine toothcomb is not worth its weight in anything.

So we had a commitment that the NBN business plan would be released after cabinet had considered it. But then, because that commitment did not wash, last Friday the minister quietly dropped a letter from the NBN Co. CEO, Mr Quigley, to a couple of the newspapers. In that letter, Mr Quigley tried to mount a different argument, about the ‘commercially sensitive aspects’ of the NBN. Then, the minister attempted to offer briefings on the detail of the NBN to the crossbench senators in exchange for signing up to a confidentiality pact—a tightly drafted, legally drawn up confidentiality document. Initially, that pact was to require the crossbenchers to sew their lips together on the NBN for seven years. When that did not work, they were going to have to be quiet for three years. When that did not work, it was changed to two weeks. The crossbenchers were going to be gagged for some time, as long as the government could get its legislation considered.

Thankfully, this was exposed. The exposure of this deal points to the fact that the government and NBN Co. have already gone over this business plan. They have already worked out just what the confidential aspects are. They have already established just what is commercially sensitive. They already know what will and will not be released. The only thing they are doing is buying time. They are stalling to try to get their legislation through this parliament this week without revealing the underpinning assumptions—the take-up rate, prices et cetera—the business case or any other detail of the NBN.

It is just not good enough. We saw again today Senator Conroy desperately inventing new phrases and words to try to weave his way around the government’s failure to give to the parliament the information it requires to do the job that every legislator in this place should be able to do—to consider legislation in a fully informed way. This is a government that seems determined to hide the facts. Senator Conroy is a minister who clearly has lost the confidence of his own side, who have stopped asking him questions on his own portfolio. We should see this document as soon as possible.