Communications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation and Other Measures) Bill 2015

Mr FLETCHER (Bradfield—Minister for Major Projects,Territories and Local Government) (12:59): I move: That the amendment be disagreed to.

The amendment made by the Senate proposes to insert a new section 98AA into the National Broadband Network Companies Act 2011.

 The proposed section would require the board of nbn co, within 60 days, to prepare, provide to the minister and publish on its website a report setting out nbn co's financial and deployment forecasts for the period 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2022. The minister would be required to table the report in each house of the parliament within five sitting days of receipt.

Mr FLETCHER (Bradfield—Minister for Major Projects,Territories and Local Government) (13:05): What the shadow minister has just put to the House cannot be left uncorrected. The nbn co cooperates in a transparent fashion, and considerably more transparently than it did under the previous government.For these reasons, I put to the House that it ought to disagree with the amendment proposed by the Senate.

Let me remind people that every week, nbn co publishes on its website an update of the rollout numbers—how the company is performing. And it is a very good story—1.775 million premises are now able to connect to the NBN, should they choose to do so. That is after some 2½ years in government. Labor was in government for six years, and they got to barely 300,000 premises.

So the transparency is there to report on how the rollout is going, and the rollout is going well. Under the previous communications minister, now the Prime Minister, a philosophy was put in place requiring nbn co to report in essentially the same way as a listed public company. Listed public companies in the telecommunications sector and every other sector regularly provide briefings to equity analysts, journalists and other stakeholders at which the CEO and other senior executives present, and that has been the practice of nbn co—introduced when the current Prime Minister was the communications minister. Nbn co is providing regular information to its stakeholders as it should. The amendment that was moved in the Senate sought a one-time forecast out to the period 2022. I make the point that in fact detailed projections have been released out to September 2018. The company is getting on with the job of building out the network to meet those projections.