Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Elizabeth and her family live in Warnervale in my electorate. Is the Prime Minister aware that her whole street can't connect to the NBN, even though her suburb has supposedly had it for years? The communications minister promised that Elizabeth's street would have an operational NBN micronode back in February, but eight months later she's still waiting. Given we are now in the fifth year of this Prime Minister's mismanagement of the NBN, isn't it clear that Australians are suffering with a second-rate NBN because this Prime Minister is so out of touch?

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for her question. With over six million premises now able to connect to the NBN, the rate at which the NBN is being rolled out is unprecedented. Some 35,000 customers are connecting to the NBN every week. After Labor was in power for four years, they had achieved barely 50,000. In four years, all they could achieve was 50,000. We are rolling out this network at 35,000 premises a week.

The member was not here—the member was lucky not to be here—to see the rank incompetence of the Labor minister who was responsible for dreaming up this scheme without any concern at all about how it was practically going to be implemented. In the typical Labor way, when they left government, when they shuffled helplessly out of government, they'd spent $6 billion, and a mere 50,000 premises around the country could connect. It was a chaotic, incompetent mess. Virtually nobody on the board knew anything about telecommunications. We had to make very significant changes to the board and the management team. And we're now getting on with delivering this network, with rolling it out by 2020. This rollout is on track to be delivered. That is an extraordinary achievement, and it's no thanks to this incompetent rabble from whom we inherited a project that was in chaotic disarray.

Of course, in any rollout of this scale, there will be customer experiences that are not what we want. That's why there's a lot of work going on to understand those specific situations and to deal with them. If the member wants to give me specific instances, of course we'll look at it. But remember this: when we came to government, the NBN was in disarray. There was no plan to get it done. We're getting it done. Every year, we're meeting the targets, getting it rolled out. Six million premises are now able to connect. That is delivery.