Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for her question. If Labor were still in government now, anybody who thinks that the NBN would have been delivered in accordance with the sorts of promises that were being made by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard would be deeply, deeply naive—deeply, deeply naive.

Mr Speaker, let me just remind you of some of the things that were going on when Labor left office. We had a situation where the NBN defined premises as being passed where cable had been laid in the street. We had the situation where NBN were continually changing the goalposts in terms of the definition of when premises had been passed. What you have seen under this government is a commitment to delivery and to getting the rollout done: 6½ million premises around the country are now able to connect.

It's also very interesting to go back and look at what's called service class 0, which are premises contained in areas planned to be serviced by fibre but not yet serviceable. In the last few years of Labor, those numbers went up and up and up. In 2013, 31 per cent of premises were at service class 0 because Labor were desperate to get whatever they could to be able to deliver a rollout and to try to cover up the fact that the numbers they were producing were simply hopeless.

Their plan said that by mid-June 2011 they would pass 223,000 premises. They passed 10,575 premises. By mid-2012 they said they would pass 496,000. They passed fewer than 100,000. By mid-2013 they said they would pass 1.7 million and they passed fewer than 300,000.

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