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

Asbestos issue. The NBN Co and its contractors and Telstra are dealing with that very effectively. The last complaint from members of the public in Tasmania to Comcare about asbestos was in June last year. There was clearly a massive problem with the contractors not making any money. Indeed, work stopped in Tasmania completely—dead stopped—well before the last federal election, because they were going broke doing the work. So we had to renegotiate all of those contracts. That has been done and work is now proceeding, as I have described.

One of the other big problems was that, in typical Conrovian manner, the Labor government was describing premises as being serviceable when they were not. We have reduced the number of unserviceable premises dramatically in Denison. It is down to only 1,500 premises, and they are being addressed even as we speak.

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