Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They have gone out of business! Remember Copperart, Deputy Speaker Mitchell? They might have been a South Australian retail store. Everything in there was made out of copper. They could not operate today, because the government is the main buyer of the old copper technology. Anybody who has been down a street in a new suburb and had the most cursory look at a pit will see the little tent up and the Telstra guy busy in there. If you had even the most cursory look at the pit, you saw it was like looking into a cave. It reminds me of the Kapunda mines. I know the member for Kingston has seen them full of water and she is not the only person who has.

This is the brave new technology that the member for Wentworth embarked upon. He said that the copper would arrive this year. Everybody would have copper or HFC this year. That has now doubled to 2020. He said it would cost $600 a home. It has actually cost $1,600 a home, and anybody who had taken the most cursory look at those pits or talked to a former Telstra linesman—who have all been sacked, by the way; there was great knowledge with those old Telstra linesmen. They had great knowledge of the pits and the technical things. All of that was wasted as they were made redundant or sometimes pushed off to contractors.

He said it would cost $55 million to patch up the old copper network. Jeez, there was a heroic assumption! It has only blown out by 1,000 per cent to $640 million, and that is an understatement. Anybody who knows these pits—full of water, sometimes full of asbestos—knows it is a very heroic assumption that it would only cost $55 million. He said 2.61 million homes would be connected to pay-TV cables by 2016. Alas, it is only 10,000. They said it would bring in $2.5 billion in 2016-17, and that is only $1.1 billion, so there is a $1.4 billion hole in nbn co's revenue line.

We hear nothing from the member for Bradfield about that. The mummy has returned to his sarcophagus in the chamber of horrors!

Mr Fletcher interjecting—

He says it is not worth responding to.

Mr Frydenberg interjecting—

I hear the colt from Kooyong. He is busy. You can imagine the colt from Kooyong playing fantasy football, can't you? He is a Carlton man, and I know the Deputy Speaker is as well—

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