Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

In his first press conference as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull said that he wanted to take the same approach to governing Australia as he did to the NBN. That statement alone should fill the people of Australia with dread. There is a myth in this place perpetuated by Liberal MPs and National Party MPs that somehow the Prime Minister has fixed the NBN. That is a myth and we exposed some of that in question time today. This afternoon, I want to take you through a catalogue of more of the mistakes that the Prime Minister has made on the NBN, the litany of promises that he has broken. The first and the biggest of those is cost.

As we learned in question time today, the NBN is now double what the Prime Minister said it would be. He promised before the last election that he could build a second-rate version of the NBN for $29½ billion. That has now jumped to $56 billion. We got the corporate plan a couple of weeks ago and it says it is not $29½ billion, that it has jumped to $56 billion. In other words, it has almost doubled what the Prime Minister promised. Now, people usually do not get promoted for things like that. You do not get promoted for blowing your budget by 100 per cent. But that is what has happened here, that is what has happened with this Prime Minister.

The other big thing that he promised and that he has now broken is that he could build the NBN, a second-rate version of the NBN, by the end of next year. He promised that everyone in Australia would have access to 25 megabits per second by the end of 2016. That has blown out as well, and we heard the Prime Minister almost admit that in question time today. Instead of three years to give everybody access to the NBN, it will now be seven years. In other words, the time to build it has more than doubled. So the cost has doubled and the time to build the NBN has more than doubled. There are lots of other mistakes and broken promises.

The Prime Minister promised that the rate of return he would deliver on the NBN would be 5.3 per cent. That is now down to as little as 2.7 per cent. He also promised that Australians with the worst broadband across the country would get the NBN first. Last week, the government released their three-year rollout plan for the NBN and that shows the 7½ million homes and businesses they say will get the NBN in the next three years. But what it also reveals is this: there are almost half a million homes, 450,000 homes, that have been identified by this government as having the worst broadband in the country that are still not on the list, that will not get it first, that will get it last. They will not get the NBN by 2018; it will be more like 2019 or 2020. It is just broken promise after broken promise—breaking promises like plates at a Greek wedding.

The extraordinary irony in all of this is that Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister, broke all these promises, doubled the deficit and got the sack. Malcolm Turnbull, the new Prime Minister, has also broken a raft of promises, doubled the cost of the NBN, doubled the time that it will take to build it, halved the rate of return on it and more than halved the speed that people will get, and he got promoted.

In question time today ,the Prime Minister talked about what is happening in other parts of the world. But what he did not mention is this: AT&T and Verizon, the two big telcos in the United States, are rolling out more fibre. Verizon, the second biggest telco in the United States, is shutting down their whole copper network and replacing it with fibre. In our region, South Korea, Japan and Singapore all have fibre networks. Even across the ditch in New Zealand, they are not rolling out fibre to the node anymore; there are rolling out fibre to the premises.

Two years ago, we were ranked 30th in the world for broadband speed. We are now ranked 47th in the world for broadband speed. We are behind most of Asia, behind most of Europe, behind the United States and behind Canada. We are even behind Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Poland. They are all ahead of us. The world is changing and so are we, though we are changing back, from fibre to copper.

I mentioned the three-year rollout plan that was released on Friday. Watch this, Mr Speaker, because this is another broken promise in the making. To understand why I think this is a broken promise, you only have to look at what it looks like on a graph. If you look at this graph for the rollout plan I am holding, you can see that for the next 12 months it is smooth and low, right up until the next election! Then, suddenly, it ramps up at this incredible speed, a ramp that Evel Knievel could not jump!

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