John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to contribute to this debate. It's quite amazing: where's Senator Conroy? Senator Conroy ran in the 2 July election last year. He was elected for six years, I believe, but he's done a runner; we can't find him. Let's go back to Senator Conroy. What did he do? He hopped into the plane with then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and pulled out an envelope with the original plan of the Labor NBN. What a way to plan to spend billions and billions of dollars—riding around with an envelope in a VIP jet with the then Prime Minister, Mr Rudd. So, away went the Conroy plan for the NBN!

I remember when they came into Armidale. I was there about to catch a plane from Sydney to Canberra—I believe Senator Conroy was actually on the plane back with me—when the VIP jet came. There was a big stage, a chart and an electronic board. They were there, with the cameras, to pull the switch to turn on the NBN in Armidale. There it was: the flashy political show put on by the then Prime Minister, Ms Gillard, and former senator Stephen Conroy. They pulled the switch down and said, 'It's on. Now Armidale has the NBN.' There was only one problem: there was nothing hooked to the back of the switch. There were no wires there. It was a big show piece. How proud they were about the NBN going into Armidale! But then the problems started. That's what happened: we inherited a mess from Senator Conroy and former Prime Minister Rudd's back-of-the-envelope planning of the NBN

I would remind the Senate that the NBN has met its milestones over the last three financial years, as we've tried to clean this mess up. It remains on track and on budget, with more than half of all households now being able to access an NBN service. Let's look back a bit. Let's not forget that Labor's NBN fell 83 per cent short of its 2013 rollout targets. That means just 17 per cent of the targets were met. That's not a very good record. So much for serving the interests of broadband consumers! Only 51,000 fixed and wireless premises were ever connected to the NBN under Labor, whereas under the coalition government the rollout has now reached a new peak of more than 32,000 connections in a single week.