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

I want to thank the member for Banks for his question. When the Labor government established the NBN project, it entered into a most remarkably uncommercial set of agreements with Telstra and Optus whereby NBN Co and the Australian government would pay tens of billions of dollars to Telstra and Optus to switch off their copper networks, their cable TV networks and their hybrid fibre coax networks so that the NBN could overbuild it with fibre to the premises.

What was remarkable was that Senator Conroy and Prime Minister Gillard did not bother to reserve the right to use any part of that infrastructure they were paying Telstra and Optus to decommission. They paid them entirely for it—complete value—but had no right to use any part of it. What we have managed to do, and concluded at the end of last year—

Mr Champion interjecting—

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