A bill to look more closely at the $43 billion NBN plan introduced by Minchin

A private members bill that if passed would force the Government to allow the Infrastructure Australia (IA) to assess the $43 billion National Broadband Network has been put forward by Senator Nick Minchin, the Shadow Communications Minister.

The Infrastructure Australia Act 2008 terms that the Infrastructure Australia operates under states that the body “has the primary function of providing advice to the Minister, Commonwealth, State, Territory and local governments, investors in infrastructure and owners of infrastructure on matters relating to infrastructure.  The body’s functions, as set out in the Act, include assessment of “policy, pricing and regulatory issues that may impact on the utilisation of infrastructure” and “to evaluate proposals for investment in, or enhancements to, nationally significant infrastructure”.

Any proposal for changes to the infrastructure in Australia could be referred by the House of Parliament for assessment and analysis by Infrastructure Australia if the amendments to the Act created by Minchin’s bill were passed.

The fact that the Government will also be using $2.4 billion of funding from the Building Australia Fund will also mean that the evaluation criteria laid down for using this funding would also need to be assessed by the IA before the Government were allowed to use any of it. The proposal “should demonstrate through a cost-benefit analysis that the proposal represents good value for money,” according to the BAF evaluation criteria.

Minchin said “This bill is designed to ensure that some degree of proper scrutiny and due diligence is applied to a project that will put at risk billions of taxpayer dollars. It requires IA to provide a written report to the minister for communications, outlining details of assessment methodology, which is to be tabled in Parliament.”

He also went on to add “Labor has said its original failed NBN Mark I proposal was immune from IA scrutiny because it was an election promise. This lame excuse does not cut it for NBN Mark II, as it is an entirely different and vastly more expensive proposal.”

Source – www.itwire.com