Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this private member's motion regarding the NBN, a motion I read in utter disbelief given the preposterous delusion it contains. Let us look at the facts.

How could the NBN be, as the member for Lyon asserts, a masterclass of technological incompetence and financial mismanagement when, by the time of the federal election this year, the NBN had in fact, made ready for connection 12.1 million Australian homes, of which 8.5 had in fact been connected; given 5.1 million homes access to ultra-fast speeds of up to a gigabit per second through either fibre to the premises or HFC; created 304 business fibre zones, 127 of them in regional Australia, connecting more than 1.5 million businesses to enterprise ethernet, more than 315,000 of them in non-metropolitan areas; more than doubled its revenue between 2018 and 2022 from $1.9 billion to $5.1 billion; and, indeed, reduced the debt outstanding on the Commonwealth's loan from $19.5 billion originally to $6.4 billion? Does this sound like technological incompetence and financial mismanagement? I don't think so.

When Labor conceived of the NBN, the internet was largely an email based system in the home. At the time, only 70 per cent of Australian homes had access to the internet, the majority through digital subscriber line services, the old DSL. The average monthly household download was minuscule. Download speeds were measured in kilobytes per second. Today it is over 500 gigabytes a month, and download speeds are up to one gigabit per second. I have news to break to the government. The speed of the internet received in the family home or small business depends largely on the speed selected by the household or the business. Today roughly three-quarters of all residential and business customers are connected to plans with download speeds of 50 megabits and above. Of those, slightly less than 20 per cent have opted for a speed of 100 megabits or higher. That is, in their judgement, enough for their needs. For millions of households and small businesses, 50 megabits per second does everything they need, enabling them to operate multiple devices and run streaming and video conferencing simultaneously.

Prior to the election, vast improvements were already underway, funded by NBN revenue, not by taxpayer dollars. By the time of the federal election in late May, hundreds and thousands of Australian homes were already able to elect to upgrade to fibre-to-the-premises connections from their existing fibre-to-the-node connections if that, indeed, was what they wanted. When Labor promised an NBN, it promised an unobtainable dream and it delivered a train wreck. The full Rudd fantasy was a network serving 90 per cent of homes with speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, to be completed within eight years, at a cost of $43 billion. All it takes is a cursory look at the corporate statements of NBN at the time that the Rudd government lost power to see the truth of what was actually delivered. In 2012 the NBN corporate plan had a target of 286,000 premises for June 2013. In June 2013 the NBN fell a full 100,000 premises short of its own target.

It took a Liberal-National government to get the NBN back on track, and, if I may say so, it took an exceptional group of telco, governance, finance, construction, legal and public policy experts leading the NBN to deliver the ubiquitous high-quality NBN that Australians enjoy today. I served with many of those people—people of the calibre of Ziggy Switkowski, Kate McKenzie, Drew Clarke, Michael Malone, Andrew Dix, Kerry Schott, Patrick Flannigan, Justin Milne, Shirley In't Veld, Bill Morrow and, of course, the great Stephen Rue, among others. There was no finer government business enterprise board. It steered NBN through massive change and significant risk, through natural disasters and, indeed, through the global pandemic. It was precisely due to the leadership of that board and the company's senior management that Australia was able to continue to function through the pandemic. For schooling, further study, health, work, weddings, funerals, arts and culture, traffic levels rose by 70 per cent during the day. Our entire lives all went online almost without a glitch or a silent buffering wheel.

Labor has no shame. This government has tried to paint NBN's self-funded 2020 announcement of a $4.5 billion upgrade as a change in direction from the Multi Technology Mix rollout. It is nothing of the sort. That upgrade was consistently aligned with the coalition's long-term strategy, set out as early as 2013, when it shifted from Labor's plan—a plan which overpromised and underdelivered. The coalition's plan was to build an NBN that Australians actually needed and wanted. As demand for higher speeds emerged, upgrades to the network were made, and they continue to be made, using the full gamut of global improvements in telecommunications technology and know-how.

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