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

Malcolm Turnbull has had basically one job for the last 2½ years, and that is to roll out the NBN. He has made an absolute mess of it. The NBN has now cost double what he promised Australia it would three years ago and the time it will take to roll out the NBN will be now twice as long as what he said it would be. The cost of fixing the old Telstra copper that he is going to use to build the NBN has blown out by 1,000 per cent.

Last week we found out that the government are going to build over 30,000 nodes to make this second-rate NBN work. To put that into clear perspective, that means that they will need enough copper to connect us here in Canberra to Russia or almost enough copper to connect us here to Silicon Valley. There has been leak after leak from nbn co, including another leak today which revealed that you can roll out fibre now to the driveway of someone's house for almost the same cost as building fibre to the node. This is humiliating for Malcolm Turnbull because it proves that he was wrong and it proves that the NBN that he is building is a slower version of what people could get. Under this technology people could get much faster speeds than they are getting under the second-rate NBN that this government is building.

Unfortunately, we have a Prime Minister like the Fonz from Happy Days, a leather-jacket-wearing Prime Minister who could never admit that he was— (Time expired)