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

The new Prime Minister claims that he has fixed the NBN, but that is a myth. Let's have a look at the scoreboard. The cost of his second-rate NBN is up. He promised he could build it for $29½ billion; it is now up to $56 billion. It has almost doubled. The time that it will take to build this second-rate network is also up. It said he would build it by the end of 2016. It is now going to take until the end of 2020, so the time has more than doubled. But the financial return for taxpayers has gone down. He promised it would be 5.3 per cent; now it has gone to as low as 2.7 per cent.

Yesterday we found out that this new Prime Minister, to make this second-rate network work, has bought almost 2,000 kilometres of new copper—enough copper to connect to Australia to New Zealand. Welcome to the 21st century!

I say this more in sorrow than in anger because I know the Prime Minister well and the people of Australia have high hopes and high expectations of him. They want him to succeed as Prime Minister, but they wanted him to succeed as communications minister as well and he let them down. He has failed them. He has not fixed the NBN. If he has fixed the NBN, he has done about as good a job as the 'fixer' Christopher Pyne did at fixing education— and we know just how good a job Christopher Pyne has done.