Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the good senator for the question. I am please to say that, in addition to the progress that we are making in Tasmania with first services to be switched on in July of this year, construction of the first building blocks of the NBN on mainland Australia has now commenced. Last week I launched construction in Mount Isa of the link that will traverse from Darwin through Mount Isa, Emerald and Longreach and all of the way to Toowoomba—over 3,800 kilometres of fibre-optic backbone cable. Nextgen Networks has been selected to deliver competitive backhaul to the six priority locations under the National Broadband Network regional backbone black spots program. The Darwin-Mount Isa-Toowoomba link is the longest and is expected to take approximately 18 months to complete. However, the shorter lengths are expected to be completed earlier. This demonstrates the Labor Party’s commitment to regional Australia. This marks another significant milestone for the NBN. In total the NBN regional backbone black spots initiative will involve approximately 6,000 kilometres of new optical fibre, around 2½ times the amount of new backbone links that would have been built under the former government’s OPEL proposal. It will benefit more than 100 regional locations, in turn benefiting a total of approximately 395,000 regional residential and business consumers in regional Australia. (Time expired)