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

Someone is rolling someone and it is not me. I think Mr Turnbull is rolling Mr Abbott along quite nicely, thank you.

But let us be clear: the National Broadband Network is being rolled out on the ground in Australia today and, by the end of this year, we will have started rolling out final preparations for the rollout of the next 19 sites. I have just talked about where they are. You are going to have to explain to every single resident in every single one of those places why you are going to give them a wireless network that will not deliver anything like the capacity of the national fibre network. You can go back to playing your games; you can pretend that everybody in metropolitan Australia has got broadband. Even according to your own policy document—and I know this particular part is right because you copied it from ours; it is true; it came straight from McKinsey—1.2 million Australians who live in metropolitan Australia are blocked from broadband completely on copper by pair gains. And then there are RIMs—such as those in Gungahlin—that block hundreds of thousands more Australians. That is just in metropolitan Australia—before you move into the regions, before you move into Tasmania and before you go to regional and rural Australia. The people from towns all around Australia who queue at my door ask me one question and one question only: how quickly can you do my town; can we be first? You should be ashamed of yourselves for this groundhog day performance. I think this is the third or fourth time you have tried to block debate on these— (Time expired)