Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications: will the minister update the House on NBN Co's performance connecting premises to its fibre network, particularly in my electorate of Swan; how will the government deliver the NBN sooner and more affordably; and what impact will this have on the government's management of the budget?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question, because there is nowhere in Australia—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Wakefield, I would remind, is warned.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

where the Labor Party's denial of reality is more evident than in the honourable member's electorate where in July 2013 it was announced that 92 per cent of the premises the NBN had claimed to have passed with fibre—do it once, do it right, do it with fibre—could not be connected. Even if the residents rang up their retail service provider and said, 'Hook us up. We've seen Senator Conroy on the television. We want to be admitted to the new internet nirvana,' nothing could happen. There was no way they could be connected.

As at the time of the election, 78 per cent of all the premises Labor claimed to have passed with fibre could not be connected. Some of them simply because they did not have any lead in, and so it would take months and months to hook them up; and others because there wasn't even a multiport in the street and there was no foreseeable way in which they could be connected

We have seen Labor deny the reality of the budget. We have seen them deny the mess they left us in—the $667 billion of debt—but that is a fairly straightforward level of denialism. But there is a deteriorating taxonomy of denialism, when you actually move into a parallel universe—in this case, the parallel universe of Conrovia—where you not only deny the facts; you create an alternative make-believe set of facts and you actually decide. You incentivise a business to pass premises with fibre, regardless of whether they can be connected, because any normal cable business would have as its primary objective to connect people. Why, Madam Speaker? I will let you into the secret: because if you connect people, you can actually get them to pay you something. The Prime Minister is onto it, but there was nobody in the Labor Party that was. What an extraordinary parallel universe they lived in.

But of course it is not the first time: Lewis Carroll summed this up very, very well. It was a sort of pre-Conrovian parallel universe, and I am reminded of that highly rational woman Alice who was speaking to the White Queen. She says to the White Queen:

… one can't believe impossible things.

And the White Queen says:

I daresay you haven't had much practice … I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Thankfully, we are no longer on the wrong side of the looking glass; we are now in the real world—the real world of cleaning up your mess.