Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has been very keen over the last few weeks to lecture business and state governments about not managing their electricity networks and what they need to do to upgrade their systems. If only he took some of that advice himself, because there is a network that is 100 per cent owned by the Commonwealth government and it is a network that he has complete control over. He owns it, he regulates it and his fingerprints are all over it. He's done a lot to stuff it up. I am of course talking about the National Broadband Network. If only he were as keen to fix the problems with the NBN as he is to lecture state governments and businesses about another network, this country would be a better place!

He won't talk about it. There are not many things that you can't engage the Prime Minister on that he won't talk about for hours and hours and hours and fill us with his knowledge on, but not the NBN. Labor has been arguing for years about the importance of a fibre network, and we've been told, 'Don't worry about it; we will have a plan to upgrade it.' Today, we learned that not only is there no plan to upgrade the copper parts of the network to fibre but nor is there any money set aside for it. This of course means more faults, poorer service and more of the NBN ping-pong that all of our constituents are suffering from.

Of course it is the regions that are going to suffer the most, because they're the ones with the most copper in the ground and they're the ones that these National Party MPs and Liberal Party MPs are doing nothing to represent.