Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very doubtful, Member for Richmond, that it will take a Labor government to sort out the NBN. It is well on its way. I am a bit of a student of history, particularly on this subject. It is worth remembering that then opposition leader Kevin Rudd went to the 2007 election offering to build an NBN network across Australia for a total sum of $10 billion, $4½ billion of which the government was going to put up and $2 billion of which was to come from the Communications Fund which had been put in place by the Howard government to ensure that rural people were kept up to speed in this advancing age of telecommunications. Kevin Rudd was going to build the network in 2008, and here we are eight years later.

At the time I thought it extremely unlikely that that system could be rolled out for that type of money. I remember Telstra in the seventies rolling out copper right around Australia and in our area where I live in Kimba. It seemed to me that $10 billion was not going to go all that far. The only part of that deal that ever got delivered of course was the taking of the $2 billion from the Communications Fund. But, not to be daunted, then Prime Minister Rudd utilised the back of a coaster on an aeroplane to come up with a proposal to build a $43 billion fibre-to-the-premises network funded totally by the taxpayer. That turned out to be a total shemozzle.

There were a few high-profile announcements around Australia when selected little communities were hooked up to fibre to the premises. The government rattled on about what a wonderful job they were doing. But by the time the coalition came to office, as was so well pointed out by the member for Swan, the rollout was at a standstill. The hook-up figures were just pure fiction. Over $6 billion had been spent on wages and salaries in nbn co alone, and fewer than 100,000 premises had been passed by the fibre. In Western Australia and South Australia the lead contractor, Syntheo, had pulled out of the contract. Once again, I thank the member for Swan for bringing that to the House's attention. The work had completely stopped. It had stalled.

The interim satellite system that the member for Richmond spoke about so fondly a few minutes ago has cost Australia $351 million. In fact, Australians were told 250,000 people would be able to hook onto that satellite, but it crashed at 48,000 because Senator Conroy had not bothered to put any caps on the consumption.

So when Minister Turnbull took over the NBN he got rid of the board that had no-one with any telecommunications skills on it and appointed a new board. He commissioned an inquiry that predicted that the NBN as proposed by the Labor Party would cost $90 billion. The new NBN board redesigned the NBN using multiple technologies, which is when we came to the position of using fibre to the node, fibre to the premises, fixed wireless, satellites and a whole concoction of different methods using the existing cables that were operating in cities at the time.

Now we have come to a stage in my electorate where I have 13 fibre-to-the-node communities that are under construction or completed. There are seven more to come in the next six months. I have 28 communities served by fixed wireless. That rollout is 61 per cent completed, covering more than 370,000 households. Port Augusta has been switched on to the fibre-to-the-node network. A satellite came online just last week. This will be a huge change— (Time expired)

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