Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

These are the signatures of 272,000 people who want the real NBN, Labor's NBN, not the second-rate NBN that this government is building. Unfortunately their petition has fallen on deaf ears; the Liberal Party is not listening.

The coalition went to the election promising a second-rate broadband network and now they are not even going to build that. Before the election the Prime Minister promised that everyone would have access to 25 megabits per second by the end of 2016. That has now gone. That promise was broken in December. He also promised nine million Australian homes and businesses would get fibre to the node. That has now gone. They have broken that promise too. So the NBN is now, effectively, dead. They are not building a national broadband network, they are building a series of networks of different capabilities, different speeds and different technologies.

What you get is potluck. It is a lucky dip. About 24 per cent of Australians will get fibre to the home, 31 per cent will get fibre to a box in the street and 11 per cent to a box in the basement of their apartment, 27 per cent will get broadband from the pay TV cable in their street and seven per cent from fixed wireless and satellite services. The minister calls this MTM, the multi-technology model, but I think it will end up being known as 'Malcolm Turnbull's mess'.

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