Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Very mediocre, Senator O'Sullivan. I rise to take note of the answers given by Senator Fifield to questions on the National Broadband Network. This is the latest chapter of the ongoing farce that is the rollout of the government's second-rate copper network, or the MTM network, as they call it. Those opposite tell us that MTM stands for multi-technology mix, but we all know that people out in the community are saying all the time that it really stands for 'Malcolm Turnbull's mess'.

Is it any surprise that Australian taxpayers are now forking out for this NBN budget blow-out. Three years ago, Mr Turnbull's and Mr Abbott's decision to roll out a second-rate copper network was going to cost $29.5 billion and be delivered to every home and business in Australia by the end of—guess when—this year, 2016. What a joke that was. The timetable for the rollout has blown out to 2020, which is four years later than the government promise, while the total cost of the network has almost doubled. The budget for purchasing new copper wire blew out by more than 1,000 per cent. That is enough copper wire to connect Brisbane to Beijing or Perth to Pakistan. What are you guys doing on that side? You need to sharpen your pencils, as my dear friend would say.

While the Turnbull government has been rolling out its second-rate network, Australia's average peak broadband speed has fallen from the 30th to the 60th fastest in the world, and by the time the network has been rolled out it will be obsolete, according to technology experts. On top of all these failures we learn that taxpayers will have to fork out $19.5 billion for a loan to complete Mr Turnbull's second-rate copper network, despite the government insisting for the past three years that the project has an equity cap of $29.5 billion. This is a backflip of epic proportions. As recently as May this year, both Senator Cormann and Senator Fifield were insisting that the government equity cap was $29.5 billion and that the remaining funding would have to be sourced from external markets. What makes this backflip especially farcical is that the government's original equity cap promise is still featured on the Prime Minister's website. Someone had better tell him. He needs someone in his office, given all the staff there, to make sure that they keep the website up to date.

There are still many unanswered questions about the government's $19.5 billion NBN bailout. There are questions such as: was the government advised that private lenders were lacking confidence in the coalition's NBN and the long-term liability of using copper? What did NBN recommend to government after receiving its underwhelming AA-minus credit rating? And what did the Department of Finance and the Treasury recommend to cabinet? Taxpayers have a right to know why $19.5 billion of their money has been needed to save this flagging project from the Turnbull government's mismanagement. All we can conclude from this backflip—the only reason why the government would have to bail out the NBN—is that private investors do not want to touch Mr Turnbull's second-rate copper network. They know that they would be being sold a lemon. According to a US telecommunications analyst, Point Topic, over 89 per cent of new global access network connections between the first quarter of 2015 and 2016 were fibre to the premises. To illustrate how out of date the government's second-rate copper network is, two-thirds of fixed-line NBN customers are already opting for the maximum 25 megabits per second speed tier, or higher speeds where they are available.

The NBN is now accounting for almost 12 per cent of complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, even though the NBN comprises less than four per cent of fixed and mobile internet services. No wonder private investors are turning their nose up at the government's second-rate copper network. They want to invest in a 21st century broadband technology, not 20th century copper. Instead, it has been left to the Australian taxpayer to save what was once a world-leading project, which, under Mr Turnbull's watch, has become the worst infrastructure disaster in our nation's history. It is like you started off with a Ferrari, you have been adding bits to it from a Kingswood and then you have crashed it into the wall. (Time expired)