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

I thank the honourable member for his question and note that, in his state of Tasmania, the Labor Party's utterly catastrophic mismanagement of the NBN had reached such a point that, months before the election, construction had completely ceased. Nothing was happening at all. Indeed, $7 billion was spent as at the time of the election and the project was less than three per cent complete.

The reason so many Australians have such inadequate broadband is that nothing was done by Labor other than to spend $7 billion and connect a handful of people in six years—six wasted years, which should have seen real action, real progress and people being upgraded to competitive speeds. Nothing happened while Labor talked about broadband. This was the most wasteful project of the Labor Party in government.

This is what we are doing: we are getting this project back on track. Already, more than twice as many Australians are actively connected to the fibre network today as were at the election. The rollout is accelerating. We have the project back on track in Tasmania.

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