Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

This government was handed a pup—and that's as far as I need to go with that analogy. But Labor's NBN was a pup, and it's those opposite who are living in an alternative universe. It's Labor, Member for Oxley, who should be saying sorry on this one, not us. It's Labor that should be saying sorry. But we haven't heard that. Now, as usual, as is customary in this place, and as has been customary in recent years, we're cleaning up their mess. We have taken responsibility to fix their mess.

Time and time again I discover in this place that Labor doesn't show much respect for the facts and is constantly in denial. In fact, in recent times we've seen the professional apparatchiks from the union movement turn Labor into a shadow of its former self. Rational arguments have been lost in a mist of fact-free fervour where spin merchants can create their own reality. So let's bust apart a few of those Labor myths.

False claim No. 1 from those opposite, from the earlier speakers, is that nations around the world are rolling out fibre to the premises. Well, that is rot. Nations around the world are overwhelmingly rolling out a mix of technologies in an economically pragmatic way. Fibre to the premises might make sense in city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, where almost the entire population lives in high-rises, but not here. They have population densities of 300 people per hectare; we're about a 10th of that in our densest cities. I know those opposite would love to turn our cities into apartment-living, basket-weaving, sandal-wearing, car-free utopias, but it isn't happening anytime soon. In the meantime, we need a range of technologies, and that's exactly what we have done in cleaning up your mess.

The second claim from those opposite is that, under Labor's original rollout, all Australian homes would have had the NBN by 2021—more rot. Labor's fibre-to-the-premises NBN policy would've cost, we know now, $30 billion more. That's generous, by the way. We're hearing this week about $90,000-per-premises rollouts. We read in the media it would've taken six to eight years longer to complete, and it would've left millions of households waiting another decade for better broadband, including those in my electorate—and I'll come back to that in a moment. Labor drastically underestimated the time and cost involved in a full fibre rollout when they embarked on the NBN program, because they didn't understand the basics of our cities and our regions—the lack of density that they thought that we had, as I explained earlier, in some kind of utopian view about what Australia should be. We know that every 10 days we're rolling out more than Labor rolled out in its whole time in office. So the reality is very different from the false claims of Labor.

The third false claim is that the network is behind schedule and that there are cost overruns. Under the coalition, NBN has hit every rollout target we've seen since coming into government. We had a three-year rollout plan released in July 2015. We set the target of reaching half of the premises across Australia by mid-2017 and three-quarters by mid-2018, and we are right on track. In contrast, back in December 2010 Labor forecast it would reach a target of 1.2 million premises by the end of 2013, but it only passed 200,000 premises. It had burned through $6.5 billion in funding out of its total budget. That was over $300,000 per premises.

The Labor Party sold us a pup. We have spent the last four years cleaning up the mess. In my electorate, we are at a point where 89 per cent of premises have access and over 50 per cent have connected, and that rate is increasing by the day. It's time for Labor to say sorry for the mess they left.

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