Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

This report has been publicly available on the NBN's website since very shortly after it was prepared in 2013. These figures have been in the public domain for eight years. This is not a secret. There is nothing new. In fact, we went through an extremely public process with the strategic review, and what the strategic review said—it's summarised on page 17—is that the original plan would have cost $73 billion to proceed with. Strike that out. We won't be doing that. Then there are a series of other scenarios, including scenario 6, optimised multitechnology mix, which was the one we did go with. Why did we go with that? Don't listen to me—I know you won't, anyway—listen to Communications Day. Listen to the commentary from respected industry observer Grahame Lynch in Communications Day, who commented on this sensationalist, revelatory story: 'The big problem with this'—namely, the stick-a-Mixmaster-through-it beat-up—'is that there was no such suppression of the publication of this option, nor had the report censored the savings estimates which NBN Co and the federal government supposedly had fought to keep secret.' In other words, an objective observer is saying that the basic premise of this ridiculous Mixmaster exercise from the shadow minister is completely incorrect.

Let me go to the point that, again, Grahame Lynch makes very clear in his commentary: we did look at the different scenarios. We looked at scenario 6, we looked at scenario 2 and we looked at all the other scenarios. Why did we choose scenario 6? We chose it because it meant that the network would be rolled out much more quickly, and the peak funding requirement was lower than for all the other options. Fast forward to 2021, and let's ask ourselves: how did the network perform through COVID, when several million Australians moved overnight to working and studying from home? What they found was that you really needed good broadband to do that, and you particularly needed good upload speeds, which the previous generation of broadband could not provide. DSL has poor upload speeds. The NBN's traffic loads during COVID were up by 70 per cent during the day, and the network just kept on performing.

A really critical point is this: if we had stuck with Labor's plan, then we would, in 2020, have had five million fewer Australian premises able to connect. So one of the clear reasons we chose to go with the multitechnology mode was that it would allow for a quicker rollout. That's not just theoretical. That's not just hypothetical. That's what happened. Can't we all recognise that Australia was much better placed in 2020 as a result of the fact that the NBN rollout, by the time COVID hit us, meant that 98 per cent of all Australian premises were able to connect to the NBN?

Remarkably, the shadow minister says that one of the issues that this matter of public importance debate is about is whether there has been failure with respect to the NBN rollout. We don't have to go all that far back in history to look at a rank instance of failure because, when Labor was responsible for this project, what a complete train wreck it was! Let's look at the actual numbers that were in the plans issued by the NBN Co. In the plan issued by NBN Co, they said that, as at 30 June 2011, the total number of premises to be covered would be 35,000. The actual number was 786. Their own plan said 116,000 premises would be connected by 30 June 2012. The actual number was 13,536. By 30 June 2013, there were supposed to be 419,000 premises connected. The actual number was 51,000. So Labor's record of delivery in relation to the NBN when they were in government was a hopeless catalogue of rank and serial incompetence. We inherited a train wreck of a failed project. Over four years, $6 billion was spent and barely 51,000 premises were able to connect.

The task that fell to our Liberal-National government was to get the rollout back on track. Where are we today? Today, eight million premises are connected, and 11.9 million premises are able to connect. In words that have been used in other contexts: compare the pair—51,000 under Labor and eight million under the coalition. And these people are dopey enough to put into the words of an MPI the question of who has shown failure when it comes to rolling out the NBN. What is the position of the NBN now and where do we go from here? With eight million premises connected and 11.9 million premises able to connect, we've just arrived at a point where the NBN has produced its first half year of being EBITDA positive, so we're making the business model work. The Labor Party established this government business enterprise. It was supposedly going to be something that would generate a positive return for taxpayers and shareholders—with the taxpayers as shareholders in the NBN. Of course, they had no idea how to execute that at all. We've turned it around. We've now got it on the path to financial performance as well as operational performance. I'll tell you one other thing that we have done: we've found a sustainable, credible path so that, by 2023, eight million premises will be able to order a speed of up to one gigabit per second if they choose to.

But there's one other big difference between Labor's hopeless plan and what we've done: we'll roll the fibre down the centre of the street and, if you want to order a service that needs a fibre connection, we'll then build the fibre lead-in. That's the successful commercial approach that's been used by Chorus in New Zealand. We're doing the same thing. It would never occur to these commercially clueless, illiterate types. They have no idea of business management. The idea of being capital efficient does not compute. They just don't get it. But you will get it if you have serious experience in managing a telecommunications business, and we've made sure that we have a capable board and capable management—people with experience. We're executing the rollout. So, frankly, if I were the Labor Party I would not be asking questions about failure when it comes to NBN, because the words 'Labor Party' and 'failure' will ever be associated when it comes to the National Broadband Network.

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