Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor's attacks today are as fantastical and lacking in preparation as their plan for the NBN was in 2009. This MPI is one of the greatest own goals ever kicked. When I read The Australian yesterday morning, I thought, 'Surely they won't do anything in the MPI in relation to the NBN.' I will have great delight in going through that great article from The Australian just yesterday. They couldn't even let the dust settle for a couple of days or a week. The best form of offence is defence, they say, and that has clearly been exhibited by those opposite today.

Let's have a look at this. Labor is as credible on the NBN as they are on the NDIS. With the NDIS, they promised the world; they gave us an atlas; they delivered a $55 billion funding black hole. With the NBN, they told Australians that they must all have fibre to the premises, whether they needed it or not. Even if they didn't want it, they would still get it. What they delivered was fewer connections in four years than we are delivering every fortnight, and yet there is another black hole. Labor's impractical plan would have cost up to $84 billion—over $30 billion more than the coalition's business-like approach. I know those opposite don't care about money—'We'll just keep putting up the taxes to pay for it.' The gall of members opposite, in seeking to attack the government for so effectively cleaning up the mess of that lot, is hard to stomach.

Labor's NBN was two years behind schedule before it even connected a single home. Labor's NBN would have been finished, if it ever was, in 2028, and would have cost $3,500 for every man, woman and child in Australia. Labor's NBN spent $50,000, $80,000 and even $90,000 to connect single premises to the network. I'm going to return to that article, because that article from The Australian was an absolute pearler. Labor's NBN, according to one analysis, would have driven up average home internet bills by more than $500 a year. Labor's plan, if you can call it that, was an impractical, financially illiterate, technologically uninformed shambles. In contrast, the coalition has taken pragmatic, business-like and evidence based action to give Australians the high-speed broadband that they need.

This government adopted a mixed technology approach, giving NBN the option to choose the best-fit and most cost-effective technology solution for each area. This government saved the taxpayer $30 billion. This government fixed the build costs to ensure that the NBN's business model delivers a modest return on taxpayers' investment. This government has made the NBN available already to 6.2 million premises and prioritised regional Australia, ensuring that two-thirds of regional premises are already connected. This government got the rollout back on track, ensuring that NBN has beaten its financial year 2017 target by 100,000 and that the full rollout will be complete by 2020.

In my electorate of Fisher, the rollout is 53 per cent complete. That's 45,000 households who are ready to access the high-speed broadband. Tens of thousands of people have already signed up. Though we have around 39,000 of our 85,000 premises still to connect, we're at least six to eight years ahead of where we would've been under Labor's fantasy version of the NBN.

Let's have a look at some of these costs to connect to the internet. This is from The Australian yesterday, and what a great article it was. For Ravenswood in Tasmania it was $91,196—that's not to connect the town; that's just one house. For Invermay in Tasmania, it was $86,533; for Kingston in Tassie—the good place of Tassie—$55,766. In relation to speed, 80 per cent of users of NBN are opting to buy the two slowest NBN speed packages of up to 25 megabits per second. That's half of the average capability of 60 megabits per second, plus— (Time expired)

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