Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

1,300 per cent, Member for Throsby. He also said in 2013 that 2.61 million homes would be connected to pay TV cables by 2016; nbn co now forecast that they will only connect 10,000 homes by June this year. He said his second-rate network would bring in $2.5 billion in revenue; that has crashed to $1.1 billion. These are all nails in the coffin of every single fantasy that that side would deliver faster broadband. But do you know what the most damning one is? In his two years as communications minister, the man who promised us fibre to the node did not connect a single paying customer to his fibre-to-the-node network—not one in two years. To say that you are the friend of the NBN and that you are going to deliver on the NBN is almost like Kathy Bates in Misery classifying her sledge hammer as a therapeutic good.

It is ridiculous that your side can competently say, in any shape or form, that you are here to deliver. You are not. You are simply slowing down the network, and people know that it is a dud. Now you have a situation where the jobs of the future are being shipped out overseas. The jobs of the future are to deal with copper. Who in their right minds ever said that the future was copper? It is like delivering a hybrid horse and buggy. It is a joke of what you have turned this network into that you could be reduced to this—that it would all be about copper.

Do you know what I would be interested in, Minister? During your time at Optus, you talked so much about the hybrid network—HFC and hybrid fixed cable. I would love—

Mr Fletcher interjecting—

Coaxial, sorry. You know the name of it and you know how bad it is. But you never mention how many complaints you got on that network, how unreliable it was during your time at Optus and how unreliable it would be now. They are still stuck in the past.

The bottom line is this: if you want to see a modern network that will meet the expectations of the community, you cannot rely on that side opposite. They will do everything they can to slow the rollout down, to make sure it is inaccessible and to make sure it does not deliver for Australians in the way that they want. It is going to be Labor that will have to fix up this network.

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