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

You will get your turn. You are not helping yourself and you are not helping any of these proceedings by being so disorderly.

Turning to my friend the member for Swan's question, the rollout of the NBN in Western Australia has been a disaster. At the time of the election, there were only a handful of premises connected. The work had basically stopped. The contracting consortium that had been engaged, Syntheo, had downed tools. It had been a failure. Getting that back on track has been very difficult. but it is underway. It is often said that you can have the best business plan in the world—and the NBN did not have the best business plan in the world—but, if you do not have the right people, it is never going to work. We do now have a much, much better executive team at NBN Co. The chief operating officer, Greg Adcock, is one of the most experienced telecom network engineers in the country—obviously, from Telstra—and Greg is getting all of this back in hand. So things are moving again in terms of the NBN in Western Australia, but it is challenging. I say to honourable members, and I think we all know this from experience, that it is much harder to get a project that has failed or that has been mismanaged back on track than it is to get a new project, from a greenfields start, on track.

So there is massive cultural change required at NBN Co, but I am very confident about the new management. The new CEO, Bill Morrow, is a man who has not only run telecom companies in many countries; he has been responsible for building a large telecom network. That is the type of experience you need in a project like this. It was always going to be very difficult to accomplish, but we now have a much better team than we did before and I am confident that we will get the project back on track.

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