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

I will take the interjection. The minister doubts my comment when I say they have made a mess of this project. This Prime Minister promised that it would cost $29½ billion. Does the minister refute the allegation that it has now gone up to $56 billion? That is double the cost, and they have doubled the time it will take to build.

Everyone in Australia was told this project would be built this year. That has blown out to 2020. The cost of fibre to the node—the second-rate version of the NBN—has tripled, from $600 a premise to about $1,600 a premise. And the cost of fixing the copper to make this second-rate network work has blown out by 1,000 per cent. Even in places where they are switching it on—in the Hunter, the Central Coast and Bundaberg—when they do switch it on it is not working properly. It is a mess. So I am not surprised that the government scurries back into the House of Representatives and desperately tries to cover that up by moving amendments here to refuse access by the Australian people to basic information about the mess they have made of the NBN.

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