Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, the set-top boxes. I had to brush up on it, Senator Fifield. It was $700—I think you might have missed that—on average for a set-top box under this program. Senator Conroy tried to explain this by saying that that was just an average price and the costs ranged from $158 to $1,528. Taxpayers were being charged $1,528 for a set-top box—not a TV! It did not have any high-definition content. It was not a smart TV or an internet-connected TV or a wi-fi TV or an android TV or an Apple TV. It was a set-top box and it cost $1,500 under the former Labor government.

I thought: that is interesting. What could you buy for $1,500 at the moment down at Dick Smith? At the moment you can buy a 55-inch Samsung TV. I am thinking about buying a new TV at the moment. A 55-inch, high-definition, smart Samsung TV for $1,500—that is what you can get. That is what the Australian consumer can get in the shops if they are smart and savvy about what they are doing, which usually they are. But the former Labor government could only get a set-top box for $1,500! Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi and Dick Smith must have been laughing all the way to the bank. They saw the Labor Party coming and they charged them that amount of money for a program which was simply set-top boxes.

People could have gone out and bought a TV with full HD digital TV capabilities for that price. But that was not how the Labor Party rolled in government. How they rolled was: whatever the cost, whatever the price; that did not matter. All that mattered was getting through the next day for them. That is how we ended up with the debacles like the set-top box scheme, which was a complete waste of money—hundreds of millions of dollars. About $308 million was budgeted in 2011 for that program. It turned out to be another example of waste from the Labor Party and another example of inefficiency from a Labor government. That is not the approach that we have taken. We provide assistance to people to allow them to buy their own set-top boxes and to make their own consumer decisions.

Not only did it cost an enormous amount of money; the actual service that was provided was at times incredibly deficient. At the time, Ms Diane Pasco from Warrnambool requested assistance under this scheme. She had four visits to her home by departmental contractors—four visits by the contractors without connecting the set-top box properly. Four visits! I reckon I could go and install my grandma's set-top box in less than four visits. Four visits from contractors, all charged to the taxpayer, and then, after those four visits—and none of them were satisfactory—Ms Pascoe had to go out and pay for a digital set-top box and install it herself! She did it all on her own for $100! The Labor Party were charging people more than 600 bucks on average to do this service and often not even getting it right. If you cannot install set-top boxes in people's homes, you cannot run a government, surely. If you cannot install a set-top box, you cannot be trusted to run the Australian government. That is what their approach was.

Thankfully, most Australians did not have to rely on the Labor government to provide their TVs or the digital content. They did it themselves. As I said, around 96 per cent—perhaps more now—of households do have access to high-definition content. They have access to a lot more since that time. Services such as Netflix, Stan, Presto, TENplay and other forms of digital content that are delivered through iPads have ballooned in popularity.