Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

If there was any greater way of telling that the government were embarrassed about their own failure at the NBN, it is the fact that their minister, who was so deeply involved in it for so long, spent the first half of his speech talking about anything other than the NBN. They do not want to talk about the NBN at all. It has turned out to be a massive embarrassment for them, because a network that was supposed to be delivered faster is being delivered slower; a network that was supposed to be delivered cheaper has doubled in cost; and they are failing to even meet the simple targets that they set for themselves. In fact, to their great credit, nbn co is rolling out apologies for service faster than fibre. They have done very well at the apology letter writing business. They are doing excellently at that.

I do love the sense of irony that the coalition put out this policy on the NBN. What it really should have been is their promise to deliver high-speed semaphore, because that is all they are capable of delivering. When you go through the statistics they are damning. Let's go through every single thing they said they would do and whether they delivered. This is the reason Minister Fletcher was unable to talk about the NBN for the first half of his speech.

Malcolm Turnbull promised everyone in the country that they would get the NBN this year. More than 83 per cent of the country are still waiting for the second-rate network. Malcolm Turnbull said that his second-rate NBN would cost $29.5 billion; now the cost is almost $56 billion. He said in 2013 he would get his second-rate NBN to all homes in Australia by this year; that time frame is now out to 2020. He said that his second-rate copper NBN would cost $600 per home; that has now tripled to $1,600 per home. He said in 2013 that it would cost $55 million to patch up the old copper network; that has blown out by more than 1,300 per cent.

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