Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I expect a general sympathetic groan of despair in once again having to rise to decry the farcical, wasteful and growing disaster that is the NBN. In my community and in my electorate office 'NBN' has become a three-letter swearword. It was full of promise but bastardised by this incompetent government. It's reached the stage that the only thing worse than waiting for the NBN is getting the NBN. Indeed, the Prime Minister, 'Mr 21st Century Copper', the man who invented the internet, has seen the light; he who was the communications minister has recently described the NBN as 'a calamitous train wreck'. They say people often get promoted to the level of their own incompetence. Well, I think the Prime Minister's certainly gone one above. His record: the cost of this multitechnology mix has blown out from $29.5 billion to $40 billion; it costs more to maintain over its lifetime and—brilliant genius moment—you get lower speeds and less reliability; and the out-of-date network is now horribly exposed to wireless competition. So we anticipate millions of customers leaving the NBN—because it's crap—and going onto 5G. NBN executives have confirmed in the business case that there's no funding to upgrade the copper network. It's not a multitechnology mix; it's a mess. My electorate has now hit the top 10 hot spots for complaints across the country, which is not an award you want to win. So I ask the Prime Minister: how long will people have to put up with this mess before it gets fixed?

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