Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The government has not been advised about what additional cost will be consequent on the delay in the connection of premises to the NBN for customers that are on HFC. The honourable member should be very clear about this: the NBN is currently available to around 6½ million premises across Australia. The 350,000 that it's available to on HFC is, therefore, a little bit more than five per cent of the total. So the rollout is proceeding at the rate of around 40,000, or thereabouts, active connections a week. It is the fastest deployment of a telecommunications network in the country's history.

What the NBN Co is doing is moving at this extraordinary pace. It's connecting more people every 10 days than Labor did in six years. It is an outstanding effort. What they're doing with HFC is making sure that customers get a great service. They have identified some technical difficulties, and so they're going to get them right. That's the difference—Labor promised the world, as the minister described, and delivered nothing. Labor promised the world and delivered billions of dollars of wasted investment. We're getting on with the job and connecting and delivering. That's the difference between our government and the failures of the six years of Labor government that preceded us.

See this speech in context