Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

The minister in his day job, of course, is the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and is responsible for Infrastructure Australia. I want to ask him whether he regrets the government breaking its election pledge in 2007 to refer any major infrastructure investment by the Commonwealth to Infrastructure Australia for a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. This, of course, was not the case with the NBN, the largest infrastructure project in our history, where no such analysis, no such homework, was done.

I draw the minister's attention to his attempt to compare the rollout of the NBN with a road. He gives the impression that he is more familiar with roads than he is with telecom networks. But the point is not that the rollout is slower at the beginning than it is at the middle and the end; the point is that the rollout is so far behind the NBN Co.'s own corporate plan. It is the NBN not failing anybody else's standards but failing its own standards. In that context, I want to draw his attention to a report today in The Australian Financial Review which sets out, as has been acknowledged by the NBN Co., that not only are they going to miss their rollout figures for the fixed line fibre-to-the-premise network in brownfield sites by a very large margin, as I mentioned earlier, but they are also going to miss by a very large margin, around 50 per cent, the target for fixed wireless, which is the technology to be used for four per cent of the overall footprint.

I want to see what the minister's view is on the NBN Co.'s explanation for this. The NBN Co.'s chief executive said to a Senate committee last week that the problem with the wireless rollout was due to large trees. I wonder if the minister could reflect on whether a cost-benefit analysis would have identified the fact that in regional Australia there are quite a lot of trees, large and small. It does seem curious that the presence of trees, large trees, would come as a shock to the NBN Co. and that it had not been anticipated. The other reason to which the chief executive of the NBN Co. attributed this huge failure to meet their target was inaccurate address information, which I gather means that they could not find their customers. This seems to be an extraordinary failure, and I wonder whether the minister's normal cheerful equanimity will be disturbed by the revelation that the NBN Co. failed to anticipate that there were large trees in Australia, some or all of them containing koalas, no doubt, and that the NBN Co., in addition to that, has failed to be able to find its customers.

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