Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—The National Broadband Network is the nation's largest and most costly infrastructure project. Regrettably, it is also the most misunderstood and misrepresented. That is because for the four years of its life under Labor, the NBN has been shrouded in a web of spin, obfuscation and exaggeration. Forecasts have been set, missed, set again, missed again, set a third time, and missed a third time. Beguiling promises have been offered but not delivered.

This is not a question of fibre versus copper. The key issue is only how far fibre optics are pushed out into the network and whether they must reach into every home and every business or whether existing copper infrastructure can be used for the last few hundred metres and in so doing save much time, inconvenience and many billions of dollars. The NBN project needs, more than anything, an end to spin.

After I became Minister for Communications, I wrote to the employees of NBN Co, telling them that this government expects to receive the unvarnished truth, not what they think we want to hear. Forecasts, business plans and practices need to be informed by sober reality. NBN Co's people must be free to express their views and perform their work without worrying whether they are contradicting a minister's press release.

1. Background to the s trategic r eview

On 3 October the government asked NBN Co to undertake a strategic review of this vitally important project. In a nutshell we posed three questions:

NBN Co. delivered a draft report on 2 December and its final report today. We are releasing the final document presented by NBN Co. in full, subject only to certain redactions sought by the company to protect its interests in current and prospective legal and commercial agreements.

The strategic review confirms what many Australians suspected, but what both of my predecessors as communications minister shamefully concealed from the public.

Critically, this report is not reverse engineered to justify or rationalise government policy, whether set out in a speech, conjured up by press release or sketched on the back of a drink coaster.

I emphasise this point because the facts so methodically presented in the review make it plain that the NBN is in a worse state than Australians have been told.

Even just prior to the 7 September election, long after it was clear to most observers that the rollout was missing every goal, the member for Grayndler continued to assert that 5½ million households and businesses would get the NBN by 2016. Yet the former minister knew that that was untrue, as demonstrated by the draft 2013 NBN Co. corporate plan that he had received and, according to a leaked minute published in The Australian, presented to cabinet in July.

Turning this project around is a formidable challenge, but we are determined to complete the project as quickly as we can, at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers, and affordably for consumers. And we are equally determined that in the rollout of the NBN, the many Australians without adequate fixed line broadband today, particularly in regional areas, receive top priority.

2. Progress and prospects of the current rollout

I will start by outlining the strategic review's findings regarding the previous government's NBN policy. Because the situation at NBN Co. is far worse than parliament and the public were led to believe, worse even than the most trenchant critics of the NBN imagined.

Rollout s chedule

Construction of the network has fallen further and further behind schedule. At the end of September the NBN's fibre, satellite and wireless networks passed 384,000 homes and businesses.

Because of construction delays, the strategic review estimates Labor's NBN will not be completed until 2024. That is 3½ years later than stated in the corporate plan, six years later than claimed in Labor's original fibre-to-the-premises plan in 2009, and 11 years later than promised by Kevin Rudd in 2007.

Service d elays

The brownfields rollout—which is connecting homes and businesses in established areas—is in even worse shape. At the end of September 227,000 premises were 'passed' with fibre, which, in the language of the telecommunications sector, normally means the occupant can order a service and receive it within a few days.

But 74,000 were 'service class zero', a term unique to the NBN Co., which indicates that they cannot foreseeably obtain any service. These are mostly businesses and multidwelling premises such as apartment blocks. A further 104,000 were 'service class one', which indicates fibre has not yet been run from the street into the household or business. This can take six months or more, based on current experience. So the bottom line is that the occupants of fewer than one in four established premises 'passed' by fibre can order a service and expect to get it in a reasonable and predictable time span.

Costs and r evenues

The cost of constructing the NBN to Labor's plans has also blown out. The strategic review estimates completing it requires peak funding of $73 billion—another $29 billion or 65 per cent beyond the cost forecast by the current corporate plan.

Unit costs for part of the network are twice as much as forecast, while NBN Co. is burdened by what the review frankly admits are excessive corporate overheads ramped up in anticipation of a level of construction and customer activity that never materialised.

The revenue assumptions made under Labor are also extremely optimistic, and entirely at odds with industry experience here or abroad. NBN Co. and its advisers found revenues between now and 2021 have been overstated by $13 billion compared to the midpoint of two more realistic revenue scenarios presented—one plausibly optimistic, and one plausibly pessimistic.

Retail prices

The exact impact of Labor's NBN on the price Australians pay for broadband depends on investment returns and retail service provider margins. But if NBN Co.'s goal is to earn the 7.1 per cent return promised by the previous government, and RSP margins remain unchanged in dollar terms, Labor's NBN will drive up retail prices by between 50 and 80 per cent. That means a $43 per month increase in the broadband bill paid by a typical Australian household. And that, of course, is perfectly obvious. If you seek to receive a particular internal rate of return and your project costs dramatically more to build, the price you have to charge your customers is going to be equally dramatically higher.

As I have noted previously, the most shocking aspect of the NBN is Labor's arrogant disregard for the devastating effect of price rises driven by their policy on the take-up of broadband among low-income households. Those opposite may not care, but the strategic review confirms the gravity of the problem.

To summarise, the cold hard facts about Labor's NBN are profoundly at odds with the fanciful tales and wishful thinking of those opposite. And it is important to note that achieving even these projections of higher costs and slower construction schedules requires a very significant improvement indeed in NBN Co.'s productivity and efficiency from the current levels. In the absence of such an improvement, outcomes would be materially worse.

3. Alternative o ptions for the NBN

The second broad set of questions the finance minister and I assigned the strategic review involved exploring alternatives to the existing NBN, which as we have seen will cost billions more and take years longer to complete than was ever admitted to the public. The strategic review's baseline scenario is its revised outlook for the NBN proposed by Labor. Beyond this it considers five additional scenarios:

The scenario recommended by the NBN Co. is the last: the MTM model. But none of the scenarios can escape the irresponsible and wasteful current and future expenses locked in on Labor's watch. The NBN Co. strategic review team estimates the burden of these inescapable costs at $15 billion or more.

The MTM rollout

Under an MTM model 26 per cent of the premises in the fixed line footprint will receive very fast broadband over fibre to the premises. Another 44 per cent are served with fibre to the node, building or distribution point, while the last 30 per cent are served via upgraded HFC—the cable rolled out for pay TV in our capital cities in the late 1990s. HFC networks are capable of delivering hundreds of megabits per second today, just like fibre, but under Labor's plan Telstra and Optus were to be paid billions of dollars to switch them off.

The MTM scenario is the least expensive modelled scenario, requiring peak funding of $41 billion. This would still be the biggest and most expensive infrastructure project in our history and the largest single national broadband project in the world. Regrettably it will be many billions of dollars more expensive than it would have been had the MTM approach been taken from the outset. Labor has wasted billions which we can never recover.

An MTM network can be substantially completed by 2019—when 91 per cent of premises in the fixed line footprint will have access to download rates of 50 megabits per second or more, and between 65 and 75 per cent will have 100 megabits per second or more—and entirely finished by 2020.

Coalition Election Commitments

This means the coalition's goal of completing the NBN in the next six years—set out in our April policy, released long before we knew the truth about the damaged project we would inherit from Labor—can be achieved.

Disappointingly that is not the case for the objective we also expressed of delivering nationwide access to 25 megabits per second by 2016. The rollout is drastically further behind schedule than we expected in April. NBN Co.'s latest estimate of the established premises it will reach with fibre by June 2014 is only 357,000—772,000 fewer than claimed by Labor at the time of the election. And NBN Co is in a far worse condition, its contractor relationships more damaged and its capacity to change course and assimilate new technologies more debilitated and diminished than even we allowed for.

A policy based on the strategic review's MTM scenario can, however, deliver very fast broadband to twice as many premises by 2016 as were ever going to receive it under Labor. Let me make this pledge on behalf of the government: we will work assiduously with NBN Co. to do everything we can to surpass the forecasts in the strategic review. Likewise, we remain determined to ensure our NBN connects those Australians, with the worst broadband in priority, unlike the NBN managed by our predecessors.

Broadband Quality

Upgrading from download rates of five megabits per second to 25 or 50 megabits per second would be welcomed by any internet user but, for those with limited or no access to adequate fixed broadband at all, it is transformational. Shortly we will publish the first ever analysis of broadband availability in Australia. It will confirm areas encompassing about 1½ million premises have little or no broadband. Many are in regional areas. All are victims of the lack of investment in fixed line communications by private carriers over the past six years, which is yet another damaging by-product of the gap between Labor's rhetoric and execution on broadband.

The critics of the coalition's approach to broadband have claimed that the coalition has not paid attention to the need for remediation of the existing copper plant that would be used in the hybrid model proposed by the company. As honourable members will see when studying this report, that matter has been taken most carefully into account by the authors of the report and very conservative assumptions have been taken about the level of proactive remediation of the copper network, an approach which is much more conservative than that adopted by comparable carriers.

Honourable members opposite have also argued that the endgame is fibre to the premises and that, in asserting that, therefore we should build fibre to the premises now rather than upgrade later. Even accepting the assumption that fibre to the premises is the endgame—and for reasons set out in the report you will see that there is a big question mark over that—as the report demonstrates, if the upgrade was only five years after the investment in fibre to the node it would still be a considerably wiser and more prudent economic decision. So the proposition of some honourable members that we should build fibre to the premises immediately, bluntly, fails to take into account the time value of money and the importance of flexibility and optionality in terms of emerging technologies.

Return on Investment

The review's preferred scenario saves $32 billion compared to business as usual under Labor. While that is the sort of number the Rudd and Gillard governments tossed around with abandon, it is a saving that makes a difference. It allows the network to earn a return roughly equal to the Commonwealth bond rate and ensures prices do not rise in real terms. This strategic review points the way to a new corporate plan, but it is not yet the new corporate plan. More work is required to set the NBN on a responsible and affordable course.

An important step in the reform of the NBN, announced today, is the appointment of a new chief executive officer, Mr Bill Morrow, currently the chief executive of Vodafone Australia. Mr Morrow is a very experienced telecom engineer and chief executive who has managed and, indeed, constructed telecom networks in America, Asia and Europe.

4. Cost Benefit Analysis and Review of Regulation

Part of the work that follows is a cost-benefit analysis of the economic and social returns from broadband and a review of the long-term regulation of the NBN Co. which will also inform the new corporate plan. The government is today announcing an experienced and distinguished panel to carry out that inquiry, which will report by June: it will be chaired by Dr Michael Vertigan AC, who will be joined by Ms Alison Deans, Dr Henry Ergas and Mr Tony Shaw.

5. Conclusion

I congratulate and thank the team at NBN Co. and its advisers who prepared the strategic review, which is the most thorough and objective analysis of the National Broadband Network ever provided to Australians—a highly professional piece of work prepared in a very tight time frame. The internal NBN Co. team was led by its Head of Strategy and Transformation, JB Rousselot, and ably supported by Tim Ebbeck and many others. The company's outside advisers were the Boston Consulting Group, who focused on the alternative models and the revenue model, Korda Mentha, who focused on the real costs and real time frames of the existing corporate plan model under Labor, and Deloitte, who coordinated this whole exercise. Valuable insights came from international experts, including Mike Galvin from Openreach in the UK and Mark Ratcliffe from Chorus in New Zealand. Finally, I want to thank the NBN Board and most of all its Executive Chairman, Dr Ziggy Switkowski.

Despite the delays and disappointments, the concept of a national broadband network remains popular. Australians want universal access to high-quality broadband and so does the government. But because of the misguided way the previous government embarked on this project as much as $15 billion has been unnecessarily spent to achieve this goal. And those dollars cannot be recovered. To date the NBN has been the most wasteful infrastructure project in our history.

But we are where we are. Let me assure the House that, under this government, we can complete this project as we promised—sooner, at less cost to taxpayers and more affordably for consumers. Our first step in that mission is to end the spin and wishful thinking and embrace reality. This is the beginning of the era of truth on broadband, the beginning of an era when we will have facts to work with, objective analysis instead of political spin. This is the welcome-to-the-real-world moment for the NBN.

I present a copy of the NBN Co. strategic review report and a copy of my ministerial statement.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Blaxland to speak for 20½ minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the member for Blaxland speaking in reply to the minister's statement for a period not exceeding 20½ minutes.

Question agreed to.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well might the minister say, 'Welcome to the real world.' We say, 'Welcome to the world of broken promises.' Today is a day that the government will rue for a very long time. Today the Abbott government is breaking one of the biggest and most important promises that it made in the last election campaign. This government has been in office for barely three months—a little over 90 days—and yet it is breaking promises left, right and centre: first on debt, then on boats, two weeks ago on education and now on the NBN. This is a betrayal, a broken promise that will hang like an albatross around this minister's neck. It is an unforgivable broken promise and this government will be punished by the electorate for it. Remember the press conference with Sonny Bill Williams in April of this year? A press conference with the virtual Sonny Bill, the now minister and the now Prime Minister at which the Prime Minister uttered these immortal words: 'Under the coalition by 2016 there will be minimum download speeds of 25 megabits,'—not anymore. And these: 'We will deliver a minimum 25 megabits by the end of our first term.' Today they are breaking that promise.

Before the election they promised: 'No excuses.' Today we get a tawdry list of excuses from this minister. Before the election they said: 'No surprises.' Today we get the worst of all surprises from this government. Remember the words of the Prime Minister when he said, 'I do not intend on making promises I won't keep.'? He has broken a whopper today. It was one of the biggest and most important promises that the government made—and the minister, from the look on his face, knows it—to the Australian people at the last election. What it means is that you cannot believe anything that this government says—not on debt, not on boats, not on education, not on the NBN. Nothing they say is worth two bob.

Here is the truth. I seek leave to table the NBN Co.'s assessment of the coalition's broadband policy prepared during the caretaker period.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is leave granted?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Leave is not granted.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister for transparency has just told us exactly what we need to know. This was never about getting us all the information; this was always a stitch up. If he was ever interested in the truth he would be prepared to allow us to table this document now.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, a point of order: the honourable member has accused the authors of the NBN Co. report of authoring a stitch up. The member has accused Korda Mentha, Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group of a stitch up and he should withdraw.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is not a point of order.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am holding the real strategic review of the coalition's dodgy second-rate NBN plan. It is the unadulterated, unamended, uncensored version of the coalition's plan. It was written before the minister sacked the experts at the NBN and put his mates in charge. It is the report that the minister does not want the people of Australia to see. It is the secret advice that was given to the minister in his first weeks in the job but he never released until today.

The minister says that this is an old report: it is dated Friday, 20 September. It is a 154-page document, very detailed, and, funnily enough, it does not say what the minister just said. It paints a very different picture. It is a scathing document, scathing of the coalition's plan. First, it says building the NBN in two stages is the wrong approach and is 'not recommended'. It says it would cost more and take longer. Second, it says the coalition's election promise that all Australians will have access to speeds of 25 megabits by 2016 is 'unlikely to happen'. Now we know why they said that.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Out of his own mouth!

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Out of the minister's own mouth, indeed. Third, it says the coalition's plan will result in lower revenues of up to 30 per cent, which will impact on the ability of NBN Co. to raise debt. Fourth, it says no-one knows how much it will cost to fix Telstra's old copper network so it can be used for the NBN—not Telstra, not the government and not NBN Co. Fifth, it also says that the cost of maintaining the copper network is estimated between $600 million and $900 million per year. That is between $6 billion and $9 billion over the next decade just to maintain the old copper network. Sixth, it says the coalition's promise of minimum speeds of 50 megabits per second by 2019 cannot be guaranteed using copper. Seventh, it says the coalition's slower speeds would compromise the provision of tele-health, distance education and other business applications.

So, all up, what does this report say? It says the coalition's plan is a dud. It was a dud in April and it is more than a dud now. It is a litany of betrayal by this government, which promised one thing before the election and which is now, after having perpetrated a deceit on the Australian people, breaking its promise today. What we know in this document and what has been proven by what the minister has said today is that the NBN will now take longer to build than promised before the election; it will make less money; and it will not meet the needs of business or families. In the end, we are going to have to come back and finish the job.

The minister has said a lot about costs in his speech, and we should not be surprised. Remember: the capital cost of building the NBN has been outlined in the NBN Co.'s corporate plans. In the corporate plan 2012-15 it was $37.4 billion. In the corporate plan 2013-16, leaked to the Australian Financial Review, it was $37.4 billion. In version 13 of the corporate plan, which was prepared by NBN Co., given to the board on 20 September and is sitting on the minister’s desk right now but not released, it is $37.4 billion. All of these accounts have been ticked off not just by the company but also by the board—including two members of the board who were there in September and have been there for all of these corporate plans—and have been audited and verified by the Australian National Audit Office, by Ernst and Young and by KPMG. So these costs are verified in government, Finance, Treasury as well as these other organisations, and now, suddenly, it has all changed. Suddenly, the experts have been sacked. People have been brought back in and we have got a different answer.

Some people might be surprised that all of this information is now out of date, but I am not. For the last few weeks, I have been warning the Australian public that this would happen. I did it again on the doors today, and I have been proven correct today. You only have to look at what Brad Orgill said in a column that he wrote for the Financial Review a few weeks ago to know why this is the case. This is what Mr Orgill said:

Selective data, conservative assumptions and extrapolations out to 2021 could be formulated to argue why the NBN might have comprehensively blown out its costs and not achieved its objective. It would be a continuation of the Coalition's attacks from opposition on NBN management and the board including threatening a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

In other words, change the assumptions and you get a different result. You do not have to think hard to see how this has been done.

Mike Quigley, the former CEO that the minister likes so much, said this last week:

Rates to build the fibre network based on the existing design and architecture were rising. But those rate increases would not have produced a cost increase because we had identified and validated, network and design changes that would have offset those increases.

He goes on:

Which is why I find it incomprehensible to hear the suggestion that the increases in LN/DN rates should be built into the forward projections and cost reductions that have already been identified, should not be.

Here is the killer:

Unless, of course, your objective is to try to confirm a pre-conceived position.

The minister in his contribution talked a little bit about copper and the work that has been done in the strategic review to cost that copper. The fact is that, in this report, there is no detail about the exact amount that it would cost to fix and then to maintain the copper network. Three weeks ago the minister said at a CommsDay conference:

We want hand on heart true, realistic and achievable options prudently costed and scoped on which we can make weighty decisions.

My argument to the parliament today is that this report does not do this. It fails to provide this information. It fails to provide the exact information we need on how much it will cost to fix and then to maintain the old copper network. It gives estimates. It gives international comparisons. It gives, as the minister has just said, conservative assumptions. It does not reveal them and does not provide us with the information we need.

This report, which the minister will not let me table in parliament, does. It tells us that the cost of maintaining the old copper network could be between $600 million and $900 million a year. So it is between $6 billion and $10 billion to maintain the old copper network over the next decade. My argument to the parliament is: would that money not be better invested in building a fibre network than keeping the old copper network going?

The most important thing today, the most important thing in the report and the most important thing in the contribution that the minister has made today is the admission that he is breaking a promise to the Australian people. This is not the only broken promise that he has made today, but it is worth remembering that it is still on the Liberal Party's website. It might not be now; it was when I came down to the parliament. This is from the Liberal Party's website:

Download speeds of between 25 and 100 megabits per second by the end of 2016 and 50 to 100 megabits per second by 2019.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not anymore.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not anymore. But, as I said, it is not the only broken promise here. The minister has also said that he is going to pare back the number of houses that are going to get fibre to the node. In the policy that he put out before the election, he said that 8,968,000 people will get fibre to the node—you know this is true; 71 per cent of the population, now, gone. All the rest of those people are going to have to rely on the HFC network. The minister said that he is going to fill the gaps there. But will it be an open access network? And who is going to pay to connect the coax from the pole to people's houses? Is it you? Is it NBN Co.? Is it the people who live in those houses? And, if they do, well, who is going to pay that extra money? The minister has promised that this would be a faster, cheaper NBN.

What we are getting here is a slower, potentially more expensive NBN—slower because internet speeds will be slower under this model than they would be under ours, slower because this minister has just broken a promise to deliver it by 2016 and, potentially, dearer because people in the bush are going to pay more than people in the city.

This is the biggest and most important infrastructure project in Australia. Remember: we sit on the edge of what will be the biggest middle class that the world has ever seen. Our challenge in this parliament is to make the most of it. We often call this the Asian century; it is also a digital century. The wealthiest countries in the decades ahead will be the smartest countries, the countries with the best educated workforces, with the best access to information and with the infrastructure to drive that. That is why the NBN is so important. It is the engine that drives jobs, creates companies, builds productivity, increases trade and makes us a stronger economy and a fairer country. It will help to build the Australia of our imagination.

Now, because the NBN is so important, it is important that it be done right, and that means using fibre, not copper which we are going to have to come back and replace down the track. The minister keeps telling us what the old, decaying economies of Europe are doing. That might be right; they might be investing in maintaining their copper. But we are not part of Europe. We are part of Asia, the dynamic and growing Asian region, and this region is investing in fibre. Japan, South Korea and Singapore are all investing in fibre to the premises. So is New Zealand and so should we; otherwise, we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage. We will be left behind with a second-class, second-rate national broadband network and, we learned today, one that will not be delivered on time. Of all days to learn this, it is the day after finding out that Holden is shutting its doors, when we should be thinking ahead, thinking about the future, thinking about where we invest to make sure we have a strategic advantage and can compete in the Asian century to set ourselves up for the future. This government is not doing that.

I have said this before but it is worth saying again. When Robert Menzies was in opposition in 1949, he was one of the biggest critics of the Snowy Hydro scheme. He criticised it up hill and down dale. Two months before the 1949 election, Menzies refused to attend the launch of the Snowy Hydro scheme; but, when he became Prime Minister, he changed his mind. He supported it, he funded it and he built it. At the opening of, I think it was, the Tumut dam project in the fifties, he said:

In a period in which we in Australia are still, I think, handicapped by parochialism, by a slight distrust of big ideas, of big people or of big enterprises … this scheme is teaching us and everybody in Australia to think in a big way, to be thankful for big things, to be proud of big enterprises and … to be thankful for big men.

Menzies was a big man, but there are not too many 'big men' on that side of the parliament, just broken promises, one after the other—debt, boats, education and now the NBN.

We have a Prime Minister who does not understand how important the NBN is, how important this infrastructure is. He has described it as 'essentially a video entertainment system'. In TheWashington Post only a few weeks ago, he called it 'wacko'. But he has also described himself as 'the infrastructure Prime Minister'. If you are going to be 'the infrastructure Prime Minister of Australia', then you need to build the infrastructure of the 21st century, the infrastructure that Australia needs—and guess what? That is what this is. That is what the NBN is. It is quintessentially the infrastructure of the 21st century, and you cannot be 'the infrastructure minister' or 'the infrastructure Prime Minister' unless you are investing in building the biggest and most important infrastructure project in Australia.

Today, Paul Keating is visiting Parliament House for only the third time since he retired. Paul Keating, like Menzies, knew the importance of the big calls in government and getting the big calls right. It was his decisions that set Australia up for a staggering 20 years or more of uninterrupted economic growth. In large part, Paul Keating built modern Australia. He built the Australia that we are living in today. The big decision we need to make today is whether we are going to build the infrastructure that we need for the next century or just for the next few years. Our responsibility is to govern not just for this generation but for the ones that follow. The pace of change and the challenges ahead demand it, and there is no better example of this than the National Broadband Network. Menzies knew it, Keating knew it and we know it, but this government obviously does not. Today they have made a very big mistake. They have betrayed the trust that was put in them by the Australian people, and for that you can be sure they will be judged very harshly.