Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects) Share this | Hansard source

There are a number of things that the shadow minister said which do require some response. I remind the House that when the previous Labor government left office, after six years in office, 4½ years after they had first announced the NBN mark 2, they had managed to build up the network to such a tiny extent that only just over 300,000 Australian premises were in a position to connect to the network, should they have chosen to exercise that desire. The number now stands at 1.775 million and is increasing at an extremely rapid rate. Not only is the total number of premises that can be connected increasing rapidly, we are also seeing the number of actual connections increasing rapidly. The weekly rate is now well above 14,000 per week compared to Labor's, frankly, pathetic performance of connecting just 51,000 premises in three years. In other words, in less than four weeks, at the current run rate under this government, the NBN is connecting more people and more premises than was achieved in three years under the previous government.

The reality is that nbn co is led by an experienced and competent board, chaired by Ziggy Switkowski, one of the most experienced telecommunications executive in Australia, let alone in the world—a former chief executive of both Telstra and Optus. It is led by CEO Bill Morrow, who is highly experienced. Across the management team there is a collection of highly qualified and experienced telecommunications executives. You may say that this is surely a fairly obvious and basic thing to do. But, bizarrely, it was not done under the previous government and that is one clear reason why the rollout performance under the previous government was hopeless.

Under the overall direction of the Turnbull government and, previously, I might add, under the very competent direction of the member for Wentworth as Minister for Communications, what nbn co is doing now is calmly, pragmatically and systematically getting on with rolling out the network and putting in place all the fundamental and basic corporate disciplines of planning, monitoring performance against plan and achieving against targets. That is why nbn co has met its published targets now for six quarters in a row.

It continues to be the case on the published numbers of nbn co and on its internal reporting that fibre-to-the-node connections are materially less expensive than fibre-to-the-premises connections, at the same time as the company has indicated in its public reporting that customer perceptions of fibre to the node show no difference to customer perceptions of fibre to the premises. So the ultimate test is what customers make of the services, and we are seeing that customer perceptions are consistent with the strategy that the coalition took to the 2013 election and the strategy that is now being implemented by nbn co.

The opposition spokesman continues to attempt to try to whip up some version of events which is at odds with reality. What we are seeing is a difficult and ambitious project, a project which we have consistently said is not one we would have started. We would not have chosen this as a starting point, but it fell to the coalition, as it so often does, to clean up Labor's mess. What we are doing is getting on with nbn co managing this ambitious rollout in a systematic, methodical and businesslike fashion. The results are there. There is a lot more to do. It is a big and ambitious project, but under the Turnbull government it is going very much in the right direction.

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