Crossbench want to see NBN documents

Crossbench senators are demanding the government table documents relating to a failed tender process for the abandoned $4.7 billion fibre-to-the-node network project.

An audit office investigation found the process cost the government and proponents more than $30 million, including some $17 million for the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

The government scrapped the plan, replacing it with the $42 billion national broadband network.

The Australian Greens, backed by Independent senator Nick Xenophon, want documents relating to the failed process released publicly. That's unlikely to happen because the coalition is not supportive of the move.

"I think because the coalition is an alternative government they don't want to be subject to the same accountability rules whenever they get into government," Senator Xenophon told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.

Family First senator Steve Fielding described the tendering process as an absolute waste of taxpayers' money.

"They (the government) stuffed up and got it bad and they cannot seem to admit that to the Australian public."

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said taxpayers will foot only a fraction of the government's planned $42 billion national broadband network. Mr Tanner denied there had been a blowout in the cost of creating a national broadband network.

The government has moved to a much more comprehensive proposal than the original proposition "to wire up virtually the entire nation".

"That's obviously expensive," he told ABC Radio on Thursday, adding the $42 billion cost was not the taxpayer commitment to the project.

"We anticipate the taxpayer contribution to be only a fraction of that."

The rest would come from private equity contributions and borrowings.

Earlier, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy denied opposition claims that the failed first tender process for the national network had been a waste of money.

"Let's be very clear. When we commenced the tendering process, the economy was booming and Telstra said they were participating," he told ABC radio.

Then the global financial crisis hit, he said.

"To quote, directly, page 78 of the auditor general's report 'the magnitude of the global financial crisis was largely unanticipated globally and heightened towards the latter stage of the process'."

The government always believed, that none of the existing tenders represented value for money.

"We then believed that we would find a solution," he said.

The government says companies involved in the process have no grounds to sue for compensation.

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