David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party, Assistant Minister for Rural Health) Share this | Hansard source

Speaking about the NBN is such a pleasure because we have just heard a diatribe about people who have had problems. When you have a system that has been beset with poor planning and on-the-back-of-a-coaster concepts from the previous government, I find it grossly hypocritical that they are now complaining about a system that they delivered to the nation. People in glass houses should not throw stones. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Just look at the record of what was achieved in the six years of the previous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. It started off, as I said, on the back of a coaster on a plane, and it was going to be $4.4 billion. Six years and more than $6 billion later, less than one per cent of their projected rollout happened, and contractors and, in fact, whole states where the rollout was meant to be happening going broke. There were rip-offs of contractors and subcontractors. There was a whole board with very few people with communication skills, and a lot of political appointments rather than technocrats. There were pop-up contractors with whole states that had absolutely nothing to show for six years of work. They had to change their own model to fibre to the premise. We changed that model because things changed—$4,400 per connection for fibre to the premise, whereas fibre to the node is $2,800.

A lot of the big contractors in the US and Europe are now using—surprise, surprise!—fibre to the node with VDSL2 and vectoring, delivering speeds of the magical 100 megabytes per second, which in your previous model, you were going to spend almost twice as much delivering. It was going to be $30 billion more and take six to eight years longer.

The member for Greenway criticised the change in financing, but it is actually not a change. There is $29½ billion of government equity in it which was always the plan, and there is another $20 billion from debt financing. And, as the member for Bradfield just pointed out, equity is different from debt financing. Debt means the NBN will be paying interest and repaying the capital over time. If any business can get cheaper capital—cheaper borrowing costs—obviously it is a good idea, and the government can get capital at a lot cheaper rate than going out to the markets. You only have to look at what has been delivered now, in the four years of the coalition running out the NBN—which we inherited from the other side. We have increased exponentially the number of people that can now be attached to the NBN. In fact, 3.4 million premises can now be connected. At the end of the Labor government in 2013, there were of 51,000 people across the country versus 3.4 million now. You only have to look in my electorate of Lyne. In September 2013, there were just over 1,000 people with an active connection. Now, it is available to 35,216 premises. Wireless rollout across the Lyne electorate is now available to 12,695—it was less a thousand back in 2013—and there are 29,000 more under construction just in my electorate alone. The old, interim satellite, that underpowered and overloaded system that was so frustrating, was available to 500 people—and they were all pulling out their hair. Now, Sky Muster has 7,000 people in the Lyne electorate who are eligible—50,000 paying customers in 2013 versus 1½ million now. You only have to look at the record. In rural and regional Australia, for instance, there has been a massive spend on internet capability—$2.6 billion in rural and regional Australia on the fixed wireless network, $2 billion on the satellite network. That means hundreds of people in remote Australia are now hooking up with 50 gigabytes available for education purposes, speeds of 25 megabytes per second for download and five megabytes up— (Time expired)

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