Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Even your minister, who is now just a senator, says, 'We clearly underestimated, I think it is fair to say, the construction model could be legitimately criticised.' That is Senator Stephen Conroy. He also said: 'We wouldn't have been so aggressive if we'd known how tough it was for the company. That was an area where we were overly ambitious.' I can understand and even empathise with those who are disappointed with the progress of the fibre rollout. That is not ours—that is your side. Having heard all this, what is the Labor Party going to do? They are going to go back to their broken model. They cannot learn. It is like every other area—six years of failure and they want to go back to it!

The Australian people will not be fooled and people in regional and rural Australia will not be fooled. What we will see in my electorate is a completely different story. In very welcome news, NBN construction will be occurring right across Wannon by the end of 2017. That is exceptionally good news. If we still had a Labor government, do you know what year I would be mentioning? 2026, but we still could not have any additional mobile-phone towers. I think it was probably taking the plan from the beer coaster and having it mapped properly that was probably one of the key reasons, but there were probably others. In Wannon by the end of 2017 construction will have started right across the electorate, and that is very good news for my constituents. That is the type of news that gets them passionate about government and about what government can deliver. As we all know, we need to make sure that in regional and rural Australia we have the ability to take advantage of the capabilities that broadband can provide. We have farmers with sophisticated business models who need proper telecommunications to be able to deliver for their businesses. (Time expired)

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