Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lyons for this important motion. I also agree with the member for Groom who recognised that the NBN was critical for Australia's response to the COVID pandemic. It was critical in helping kids to continue their education, critical in helping families to stay connected and critical in terms of helping businesses to stay open. Over the last two years, the reliance on services over the NBN has never been greater, so it is worth considering the history of the NBN and the decisions made by successive governments to deliver this critical piece of infrastructure.

It was 2009 when then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the beginning of a new National Broadband Network strategy. The plan was to build fibre to the premises. This would be a quantum leap from the existing unreliable national internet infrastructure that relied primarily on copper cabling. It was a bold plan. It was visionary and it was the plan that Australia needed. Quite in contrast to what the member for Groom just said, almost immediately, the Liberals opposed it. Tony Abbott, as the Leader of the Opposition, said in 2010 that they would, 'demolish the NBN because it wasn't necessary'. Soon thereafter, the shadow communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said that there would be no demand for the services that the NBN would deliver, and it was not required in Australia.

Sadly, after the 2013 election, the Liberals got their hands on Labor's NBN and almost immediately they began to vandalise it. The Liberals' plan was to replace the largely fibre-to-the-premises model initiated by the Labor government with what they called a multitechnology mix or MTM model, including a range of old technologies including fibre to the node, fibre to the curb and hybrid fibre coaxial cable.

The changes to the NBN under the Liberals are some of the worst public policy decisions in Australia's history. The consequence of the move to the MTM model has ended up costing Australia taxpayers billions of dollars more than the deep fibre NBN original model and will result in a network that is considerably less capable of meeting the nation's future internet needs. The Liberals' policy took the visionary NBN and turned it into three kinds of disaster. First of all, it was a financial disaster.

The mixed technology approach was supposed to be much cheaper than full fibre. Malcolm Turnbull told us it would be much less expensive. First he promised it would cost just $29 billion but then this will successfully revised upwards, first to $41 billion then to $49 billion and then to $58 billion. The Liberals went a bit wrong in their financial forecasts. This was not a small forecast error; they were out by a factor of two. The cost was double. They were 100 per cent wrong in their forecast of the cost of their new model. As a result, their NBN model became one of the biggest blowouts of public financial projections in a decade. The cost blowout makes a mockery of Liberals' claims to be prudent financial managers.

Not only was the additional build cost disastrous but the changes to the NBN also degraded the ongoing financial position of the network. The financial health of the NBN is a function of its cash flow, which in turn is a function of revenue and operating costs, and the original model was a relatively low-cost operating model with minimal need for upgrade or maintenance. But the current NBN is beset with additional costs, not only the additional costs which we are now experiencing of upgrading the network through additional capital spend but also additional costs of ongoing maintenance of a much more complex and fragile network using a mix of technologies, all of which are approaching the end of their life-cycle. For both of these reasons, the future cash flows of the NBN have been burdened by these additional costs, weighing down the long-term viability of the NBN.

Second, the new NBN model is operationally disastrous. Rather than having a clear, reliable, high-speed fibre NBN, we have an NBN which delivers worse reliability through inferior technologies. Now we are having to change that but years and billions of dollars have been wasted.

Finally, the changes to the NBN were economically disastrous. We have a wasted decade of opportunity, a wasted decade of when we could have been surging ahead with the digital economy, a wasted decade when we could have been moving our digital economy forward. Australians know who to blame: Liberals, the hubris of Malcolm Turnbull and the incompetence of the member for Bradfield as communications minister.

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