Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to speak to this MPI today because it clearly exposes the fact that the only second-rate NBN in Australia was the one that was going to be delivered by Labor—the party who when in government promised one thing but then delivered little more than press releases and promises that stretched into the never-never for years. It is no exaggeration to say that under the previous Labor government the NBN was one of the most poorly managed projects in the history of the Commonwealth. When they announced it with great fanfare, then Prime Minister Rudd and Minister Conroy extravagantly promised that the rollout would be complete by 2018 and would cost the government no more than $26 billion. Of course Labor representatives in my electorate on the Central Coast did the same.

In April 2013, former Labor MP Deborah O'Neill and Minister Conroy came to Gosford and pushed a big red button on the Gosford waterfront, claiming our region was open for business thanks to the NBN. In fact, the then member for Robertson said: 'We love this town and we love where we live, but we need jobs and need something to transform this area. It's time to come to Gosford and do some business.' Well it is time to come to Gosford and do business, so it is pretty ironic to see Senator O'Neill now actively campaigning against the Turnbull government's commitment to deliver 600 new federal jobs to Gosford, but I digress. Labor claimed that their NBN was a magic bullet, but when the gloss of the press release and the shiny red button wore off, it was a mess—it was a mess around Australia and a mess on the Central Coast. For instance, despite Labor's claims on the coast that a massive 90 per cent of premises in and around Gosford—

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