Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to the Prime Minister's previous answer. Does the Prime Minister appreciate that the majority of new NBN customers previously had a working internet service? Is the Prime Minister so out of touch that he doesn't understand that people are complaining because his second-rate copper NBN is slower, more expensive and less reliable than the Prime Minister promised?

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

I thank the honourable member for her question, because it gives me an opportunity to update my earlier answer. As of 12 October, the latest numbers are: 6,188,000 premises are able to connect to the NBN and 3,024,650 are activated, paying customers. Nearly 40,000 premises were activated on the NBN in the last week. Labor, remember, did 50,000 in six years.

The reality is this: as the honourable member knows, and she should know this, what has been going on is that retail service providers—Telstra, Optus, TPG—have not been buying enough bandwidth to provision their customers. That is being investigated by the ACCC. It has been called out. They've been given three months to get their act together and ensure that, what they promise, they deliver. It has nothing to do with whether the network is fibre to the premises, fibre to the basement, fibre to the node or hybrid fibre coaxial; the problem of underprovision by retail service providers is common across all technologies on the NBN. The honourable member should recall that she was part of a government that completely and utterly failed this project. They left us a train wreck. We've turned it around. We're getting it built. Over six million premises can connect, over three million are connected and are active, paying customers, and it'll be finished by 2020.