Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Or Dale Buggins, for that matter. To understand exactly how big this ramp is, the government are saying that they can deliver the NBN to more than half of Australia in just two years. More than half of Australia, apparently, is going to get the NBN in just two years if you vote for Malcolm Turnbull. It is not realistic. It is not achievable. It is not just me who is saying that; even the new minister, Mitch Fifield, has described it as 'ambitious'. But, more importantly, Ziggy Switkowski, the chairman of nbn co, has described it as 'heroic'. The Australian Financial Review from Monday, 19 October, says:

National Broadband Network chairman Ziggy Switkowski has warned that it will take a 'heroic' effort for the project to be made available to more than 11 million homes before 2020 …

So you have the minister who says it is 'ambitious', you have the chairman who says it is 'heroic' and leaked documents from nbn co this week show that an internal memo went round to staff last week saying they are already behind schedule. They have not even hit the ramp-up yet!

Remember that all of this depends on the state of the copper. As the corporate plan revealed on page 51only a couple of weeks ago, they still do not know what the quality of the copper is. Page 51 says:

The quality of this network is not fully known.

They have bought back the old copper network that John Howard sold last century and they still do not know how bad it is. They call this due diligence!

Worse than that, contractors I have spoken to, asking how bad the copper network is, have told me that nbn's working assumption is that 10 per cent of the copper pairs in the fibre-to-the-node areas will need to be fixed. But in places like Newcastle and the Central Coast, closer to 90 per cent of the copper pairs have needed work. In some places, the copper was so bad that they had to replace old copper with new copper. One contractor told me that in Newcastle and on the Central Coast 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the copper lines are having lengths replaced.

This is just the tip of the iceberg because, as we found out in estimates last night, nbn has ordered more copper . It has ordered 1.8 million metres of copper. To put it another way, it has ordered 1,800 kilometres of copper. That is enough copper to connect Australia to New Zealand! The Prime Minister says that John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, is his role model. But what is John Key doing? He is not rolling out fibre to the node. He is not rolling out more copper. He is rolling out fibre to the premises. What are we doing? We are going back to the node.

Hollywood could not have written a script like this. We have been told that today, 21 October 2015, is Back to the Future day—the day Michael J Fox's character, Marty McFly, landed in the future. What did Hollywood imagine he would find? It imagined flying cars and flying skateboards. What do we have instead? We have a government that is buying almost 2,000 kilometres of copper.

It is a myth that this Prime Minister has fixed the NBN. He did not become Prime Minister because of what he has done on the NBN; he became Prime Minister in spite of it. He has doubled what he said it would cost. He has doubled the time it will take and halved the internal rate of return on this project as well. Now we find out that he has bought almost 2,000 kilometres of copper. It is just appalling. The idea that he has fixed the NBN is just a myth. (Time expired)

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