Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I return to the debate, and I remind those who are watching this and seeing the display opposite of Labor's mess. I look at page 52 of Labor's Mess 2007-2013, which is also on my website. There is no more monumental example of an infrastructure mess than the NBN. The document says:

In 2007 Labor promised a National Broadband Network costing $4.7 billion and which would be completed by 2013. In 2009 they switched to an NBN costing ten times as much.

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After six years of Labor government, only 3% of Australians had access to the NBN and fewer than 100,000 were using it. Labor's NBN achieved only 16% of its original rollout target for June 2013 and only 7% of its target for paying customers.

What we have seen again from Labor, from the previous federal government, is an example of incompetence. This is an infrastructure project that Labor failed to deliver, and the member for Blaxland has got his figures dramatically wrong.

As we know from our strategic review, we have costed this project at $78 billion. We are proudly delivering about 26 per cent of fibre to the premises for homes right around the country. Let me just remind the people of my electorate in Corangamite that, when Labor decided to roll out the NBN, one of the big differences was that it did not prioritise those who needed the NBN the most: those in rural and regional areas. Frankly, it is a disgrace that Labor completely excluded from rollout the people in southern Geelong and in places like Highton, Belmont, Grovedale, Waurn Ponds and Marshall, where people in my electorate are absolutely desperate for internet connections. Once again we have seen of Labor's absolute failure to care for country people, to regard country people as a priority. The rollout in southern Geelong is a very good example of that.

I also remind the House that, apart from the massive cost blow-out, as we see in the booklet 'Labor's mess', not only were the targets appalling but without policy changes, as the independent review has revealed, up to 200,000 households and businesses in regional, rural and remote areas were going to miss out entirely on a connection under Labor's NBN. This has been a monumental infrastructure disaster. We are proudly fixing Labor's mess. We are proudly rolling out the NBN quickly and efficiently and delivering fast broadband right across Australia, which is what the Labor Party, unfortunately, failed to do as it did with so many other things.

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