Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw without equivocation.

As I was saying, you have to be honest with the people of Willunga. Those opposite need to be honest with the people in Armidale. Eighty-seven per cent have signed up to get the National Broadband Network. It is 74 per cent in Kiama Downs and Minnamurra and 62 per cent in Townsville, and we are just in the beginnings of the process in Brunswick. Be honest with them. Tell them that you intend to turn the network off and that their prices are going to go through the roof. Do not pretend to them that they get to keep their network at the same price; tell them the truth. More and more of the second-release sites will start to be built—places like Bacchus Marsh in regional Victoria, South Morang in Melbourne, Brisbane’s inner north, Springfield Lakes, Toowoomba, Riverstone in New South Wales, Coffs Harbour, Modbury, Prospect, Victoria Park, Geraldton, Casuarina and, here in the ACT, Gungahlin. Just tell these people the truth. You are planning on turning off the rest of the network and their prices are going to go through the roof because we only deliver the pricing by using a cross-subsidy unashamedly.

So let us not pretend that the opposition are remotely fair dinkum about their opposition. They are determined to demolish the NBN, they are determined to block the rollout and they are determined to frustrate ordinary Australians’ capacity to access one of the greatest inventions by humankind. Those opposite have every spurious argument under the sun. On the one hand—