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

What I will do, to gratify the wishes of the courageous gentleman opposite, is answer all of his questions, which will mean that more time will be taken up with me on my feet and he will have less opportunity to ask questions—the usual self-defeating approach.

The answer to the question is as follows: the previous government, in entering into its arrangements with Telstra, and a similar deal with Optus, basically agreed to pay a gigantic sum—tens and tens of billions of dollars—over a long period to Telstra in return for switching off, decommissioning its copper network and its hybrid fibre coax network insofar as it was used for broadband data or voice, and similar arrangements with Optus. In entering into those arrangements, the previous government, in what can only be described as one of the most self-wounding, stupid political betrayals of the public interest, chose to take no option over the legacy infrastructure they were paying Telstra to switch over. If you were going to pay billions and billions of dollars to Telstra to switch off its copper, you would think that you would say, 'And by the way, I want to have the option to use some or all of it myself if I choose to do so'. That is what any rational businessperson would do. But they did not do that. Instead they ran this project politically; they turned fibre to the premises, which is just one access technology, into an ideological cult and they were determined to make it as hard as possible for any subsequent government to take a more rational approach.

Opposition members interjecting—

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