House debates

Monday, 18 November 2013

Questions without Notice

National Broadband Network

2:31 pm

Photo of Malcolm TurnbullMalcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question, and I note her passion and strong advocacy for ensuring her community has access to very fast broadband. She is quite right: the biggest barrier to broadband is not technology, it is affordability. Australians on the lowest incomes have the lowest rate of internet usage in their households.

Of course, under Labor's NBN plan—and this is their plan, not ours—average revenue per user was going to treble from 2012 to 2021. So they were going to spend tens of billions of dollars on broadband and make it less affordable for Australians, not more affordable.

But of course the truth is that there was a lot about the NBN that the Labor government knew that it did not share with the Australian people. The former minister, the member for Grayndler, was well aware from the NBN Co. itself that it was not going to hit its targets for June 30 2014. He refused to release the reports and indications that showed it was going to miss that target by 70 per cent. He then—

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