Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

If ever we needed further evidence that the government is just waving whilst they are drowning under their inordinate hopelessness, we have just heard it from Senator Crossin, who for the first minute of her contribution to this debate wanted to talk about everything else—until she was most appropriately pulled up by you, Mr Deputy President. Senator Crossin wanted to divert attention from the huge failings of this government and the failings of Senator Conroy; she did not want his National Broadband Network being discussed in this chamber appropriately. It is outrageous.

Let me cast my mind back. The NBN has come about because of an earlier failing. The government in its previous incarnation under Mr Rudd, who they betrayed so mercilessly, did not receive the appropriate number of proper tenders for their previous broadband network. So what did Senator Conroy do? Senator Conroy could not get an audience with his holiness Kevin Rudd so he had to jump on a plane and fly for hours and hours to cook up a $43 billion taxpayer spend on a national broadband network. There was no business plan; there was no case made; there was no cost-benefit analysis. There still has been no cost-benefit analysis. Apparently a business plan has been done, but only after the objectives and policy had been released and announced. That does not mean that the plan will be good, worthwhile or in the public interest. It is not going to stack up under the cost-benefit analysis test. We know that because the government will not have it.

In my previous role in the financial markets I came across an old phrase: ‘When the tide goes out you can always tell who has been swimming naked.’ Let me tell you: the tide is going out on this NBN proposal and on Minister Conroy. The sight is not a pretty one, because Senator Conroy is trying to hide his inadequacies with a range of obfuscations, misleading statements and all sorts of excuses about why he will not provide the details. Last week, as the tide was going out on Senator Conroy he said, ‘I want cabinet to consider the business plan before I release it next week.’ Today he said that he is not in the process of releasing cabinet agendas and discussions. He has come up with yet another excuse not to release the business plan: Mr Quigley.

One might excuse each of these things if they could be taken in isolation. One could say, ‘Well, there’s a plausibility about this,’ but when the excuses are taken cumulatively and when you look at the track record of this government—including that minister and other ministers—you see that something is fishy. There are dead fish on the ocean floor where the tide has disappeared and Senator Conroy is standing exposed with his awful inadequacies for everyone to see.

Let us be very clear about this. There is a $43 billion spend involved in a massive infrastructure project but this government are not able to tell us what the benefits will be. They are not able to ascertain what the permanent savings will be. I asked Senator Conroy about that last week; he could not give us a list. It is of such sensitivity that the government wants to keep talking in general terms about the national broadband network. People do want fast broadband—there is no doubt about that; the coalition had an excellent plan to provide it at a reasonable cost—but those on the other side of the chamber will not ask Senator Conroy about the detail. Senator Crossin wanted to talk about anything but Senator Conroy’s lacklustre contribution. People have been asking other ministers—like Minister Sherry, Minister Wong and Minister Carr—about the national broadband network.

Let us talk about innovation, which Senator Crossin briefly referred to. Innovation, in the eyes of this government, is extraordinary; it is where you give $30 million to a car manufacturer to build a car they were already going to build and which they were only going to sell a few thousand of—the Hybrid Camry, for example. The minister responsible for that, I remember, had a policy of sending text messages up into outer space. I wonder how that has gone? That has gone the way of Kevin Rudd, I guess.

We have $43 billion worth of taxpayer money that has been funnelled into a program that we do not have much detail about. And this government are hiding away from that. If they have nothing to hide, if it all stacks up, they should release it and open it to the full scrutiny of the parliament. They should let people gaze upon it and make their judgments at will—let them defend it in the public arena rather than just through rhetoric and insinuation and trying to intimidate people into it. There are many questions that need to be answered and at the very least Senator Conroy should stand accountable for them.