Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We were enjoying that contribution, too, I can assure you. I could have enjoyed listening to Ken and Derek. Being a roving complaints bureau, as the opposition is becoming as they travel around the country, scurrying around looking for unhappy people, is one way of surviving through the long and dreary years of opposition—wandering around seat-by-seat conducting NBN crisis meetings, where you put on some scones and wait for people to filter in, popping their ALP membership card above their head and sitting in the front row, given a complaint to read out, and then away they go. We had one of these in my electorate of Bowman, where not a single genuine complaint was elucidated for NBN Co.

I'm not saying there are no genuine complaints. The TIO data is absolutely correct. We need to break up the complaints according to the amount of Australia that's connected. If you are going to double the footprint of NBN, then, self-evidently, you are going to double your complaints. If you have twice as many people connected to NBN, self-evidently there will be twice as many complaints. In fact, complaints per population are falling—a very inconvenient truth for the opposition.

The other great concern of our good friends on the other side is that they promised the gold-plated monorail to every home—the super-fast government-run broadband, where everyone got the same colour curtains, and the same length, and it was all going to happen the day after they planned it. They got to the end of their six-year tenure and, of course, just 200,000 houses were NBN-ready. That sounds like a pretty significant number. Fifty thousand had been connected after six years and multiple failed starts. Fifty thousand sounds like a great number. There we were with 50,000 divided by 150 electorates. That's only 300 households per federal electorate. It's worth repeating: the 50,000 who were connected represent only around 300 households per electorate—that's two streets.

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