Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network has, by all views, done a very constructive job and tried to be reasonably apolitical in its approach to investigating and inquiring into the government’s National Broadband Network policies. This committee has been able to look at the government’s promise to spend $43 billion of taxpayers’ money rolling out a national broadband network. As part and parcel of its policy commitment, the government thus far has not provided a cost benefit analysis of its National Broadband Network plans. In particular, Senator Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, told the Senate in answer to a question on notice on 17 August that issues critical to the fate of the National Broadband Network—such as the amount that the government will contribute to NBN Co., the strategies that the government has in place to encourage private investment in the National Broadband Network, the phasing and cost of the rollout of the National Broadband Network and the provision of a business case for the building of the National Broadband Network—would be referred to the implementation study.

Moreover, the government has promised to deliver fibre to the home for 90 per cent of Australians. Ten per cent of Australians, the government says, will get something else. We still do not know who is in that 10 per cent, because the government has said that towns of over a thousand people would get fibre to the home. Towns of over a thousand people account for about half a million Australians and, at last count, 10 per cent of the Australian population was some 2.2 million people, so what about the other 1.7 million people who are in the 10 per cent but supposedly not part of the 1,000-people rollout?

The government has not answered those questions and Minister Conroy, in answer to the question on notice on 17 August, deferred the answer to most those questions to the implementation study. We are still awaiting the outcome of the implementation study. My motion seeks the extension of the terms of reference of this select committee—which is focused entirely upon the National Broadband Network, comprises a group of people who now have significant experience in considering aspects of the National Broadband Network and is focused on just that—to the end of April next year because of the critical issues which the government has deferred to be determined by the implementation study, upon which we still wait.

This implementation study would largely have been done by the time originally forecast for the termination of this select committee, but now the government says that the implementation study will be delivered by the end of February next year. That delay compels that this committee is the right vehicle to assess and inquire into the implementation study on which the government is hanging so much off critical to a $43 billion spend. It then allows some four weeks during March for the government to respond to the implementation study, which it now says is due at the end of February, and then allows the committee some four weeks during April to inquire into and deliver what would be its final report.

On that basis it is proposed by way of this motion to include a recommendation in the report that seeks to extend the term of the committee to the end of April next year. This will enable the committee to inquire into the implementation study and, once delivered, allow the government to respond to the implementation study and allow the committee four weeks to hear from stakeholders in the field about what they think of the implementation study, particularly given that Minister Conroy has passed off answering all the key questions about the who, what, when, where, why and how of a $43 billion spend of taxpayers’ money to this much awaited implementation study.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Fisher’s) be agreed to.