Mr TURNBULL (4:14 PM) —I move amendment (3):

The purpose of this amendment is to make the NBN genuinely subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The government very skilfully was able to persuade the Greens in the previous debate in the House and indeed in the Senate to accept an FOI amendment to apply to the NBN which says that the NBN is subject to the Freedom of Information Act but that documents which relate to its commercial activities are exempt. Given that it does not have any activities which are not commercial, that means that, all other things being equal, the entirety of its documentary material is exempt.

This is a monopoly. It is a government owned monopoly. It represents the largest investment in any one infrastructure project in our country’s history and it should be properly scrutinised. One of the many paradoxes is that the entities that are least open to public scrutiny are those that belong to the government. A public company—Telstra or SingTel, for example—that is listed on the stock market has to publish any material information that is price sensitive. It has an obligation of continuous disclosure. It is being scrutinised by dozens of brokers’ analysts, and of course it has thousands, if not more, shareholders with an interest in it. Government corporations suffer from the tragedy of the commons because they belong to everybody but no individuals have a strong enough interest to follow them. That is why it is so important that freedom of information provisions apply and so important that there is proper parliamentary scrutiny.

If this amendment is accepted, the NBN will be subject to the act. It will still have the benefit of the exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act in sections 45, 46 and 47. Information received in confidence can be exempt. Information which relates to trade secrets can be exempt. Commercial information the disclosure of which would destroy the value of that information is exempt, and of course documents relating that are subject to legal professional privilege are exempt.

The Greens and the crossbenchers, sadly—not all of them but a number of them—were taken for a ride with that clayton’s amendment in the previous debate. This is an opportunity to subject the NBN to full and proper scrutiny. It will be said—I can sense that the member for Greenway is keen to say this—that the government’s amendment is comparable to the provisions that apply to Australia Post. That is simply not correct. The provisions that apply to Australia Post only exempt from production documents which relate to its commercial activities where it is in competition with other companies, other businesses. For the bulk of Australia Post’s operations, it is a monopoly and a utility. The NBN will not be in competition with anybody in its fundamental purpose of providing the monopoly fixed line operation, and that is why they tweaked the provisions, the language, that had been used for Australia Post. But the consequence is that, because documents relating to its commercial activities are exempt, as it does not have any charitable or philanthropic activities that I am aware of, all of its documents would be subject to disclosure. For that reason we need to have a thorough application of the FOI Act to the NBN, and this amendment—very brief and very straightforward—would do just that.