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

A very popular one that you couldn't even deliver! So a very popular policy that is another demonstration of the flawed judgement of your government and of the flawed policymaking of your government! You spent millions of dollars in attempting to deliver that policy, on the processes of going out to tender, and in the end it fell over. So what did you do? Well the then Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, said, 'I've got a plane trip. Come and talk to me about this disaster of the fibre to the node policy. Come and talk to me about it.' So you hopped on a plane with Mr Rudd and you pulled out an envelope like this, which somebody has helpfully left here sitting on the desk next to me, and you said, 'Well, double or nothing doesn't quite work on this. Double or nothing of $4.7 billion doesn't work. But why don't we just shift the decimal point across one? Why don't we just blow it all and put it all on fibre to the premise instead?' There was no decent study of it, there was no decent analysis of it and no clear argument as to why this was the best, most cost-effective, most efficient proposal to provide fibre broadband in the most cost-effective way to all Australians. There was no rigour and no analysis and no real scrutiny of it, and you have ducked and dodged and avoided any effective scrutiny of it ever since.

If you had such confidence in this proposal that you are putting forward, Minister, you would have accepted the opposition's call for a cost-benefit analysis a long time ago. For all of the millions of dollars that you have spent on reports, studies and getting this thing off the ground, it would have been a pittance along the way to say, 'Do you know what? I take up that challenge and I will subject it to a cost-benefit analysis. I take it up because I have confidence that the cost-benefit analysis will come down on my side of the ledger.' But you do not have that confidence, Minister, and that is why you have not taken up the challenge that the opposition has reiterated again and again to you in this regard.

Most of the significant legislation to allow you to create your $50 billion debt funded monopoly has passed through this place, but this is an important piece of legislation that deals with the niche part of the proposal. It is an important niche part, the part that relates to greenfield sites, to new developments. And, of course, because it is a niche part it has niche impacts. But to the businesses who are concerned and will be affected they are not niche impacts; they are real impacts. To the people who have invested money in building up those businesses, they are not niche impacts; they are real impacts. And you are not proposing that you are going to come along to those businesses and pay them billions of dollars, like you are to Telstra or to Optus to migrate customers across and to compensate them for the loss of their cable networks. No, you are not proposing any compensation for these businesses. You are just changing the ground rules for them; that is what you are doing. So you are changing the ground rules for these businesses and if the new business model of the NBN does not work for them it is too bad, too sad—as is the attitude of you and your government. What we will see instead is a situation where their businesses are threatened and the jobs of those businesses are threatened. Ultimately, it will be a combination of Australians, customers, consumers, people purchasing the properties in question, developers and those involved in the development industry and taxpayers who will cop the impact. The taxpayers will cop it because your stripping of competitiveness out of this sector will see prices go up and we will see the NBN Co. as a giant monopoly simply become a giant, fat, sluggish monopoly, as all monopolies ultimately do. We will see developers lose out because they will not have choice, because eventually the choice will just not be there. The developers just will not have the choice of who to go to.