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

There are now 32,000 connections in a single week, and you had 51,000 over how many years? It's a big difference. The peak funding target of $49 billion announced almost two years ago has stayed the same, as has the completion date of 2020. Sure, it's taking longer to roll out the NBN. It's a big country.

I'm very pleased to see so many of the wireless NBN towers being constructed in rural and regional areas. I was talking to my wife, who runs a small newspaper, just recently. She told me that previously, when another of the few independent newspapers left in northern New South Wales had finished putting their paper together and sent it off to the printers, it would take 1½ hours to email a 12-page newspaper to the printer. Now, with the NBN, it takes them 45 seconds. That's a big difference—1½ hours to 45 seconds. That's the improvement.

Sure there are some gremlins. I'm aware of that. I've had people ring me and say: 'We've established a new business. We've notified Telstra and other carriers, who'll be hooking us up, and we'll be starting the business next week.' They've given a month's notice to Telstra, but, when they open their business, there's no phone and no NBN. We've got a bit of a blame game going on. Some of the telcos are blaming NBN Co, while NBN Co are saying: 'It's not our fault. We've hooked it up. The telcos are not doing their job.' I hope that blame game stops, and we get it rolled out and completed as soon as possible. But it is a big country, and I commend Minister Fifield for the work he's done with the NBN after inheriting a mess from Senator Conroy. I wonder why he left? Never mind. He packed up and did the bolt.

NBN Co has hit every rollout target in every quarter for more than three years, and the company is now transitioning from building the network to also being an operator of critical national infrastructure that is serving millions of homes and businesses across the nation. Over the past year the number of premises able to access the NBN has doubled, so it's getting there. It's rolling the NBN out quicker than it ever did under Labor, and I think it's very cheeky for Labor, through Senator O'Neill, to even raise this topic, given the mess they made of this organisation. (Time expired)