Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Smith for his question, and I'm glad those opposite share in our delight at the progress of the rollout of the NBN. As I think all colleagues in this place would appreciate, the NBN is becoming a reality, and can I on behalf of myself and my fellow shareholder minister, Senator Cormann, congratulate NBN on another strong year of performance.

The annual results announced yesterday show that the company has an achievable plan to complete the network by 2020. That's six to eight years sooner than would have been the case under those opposite, and at $30 billion less cost. The good news is that now one in every two Australian homes and businesses can access the NBN. At the end of the financial year, I can report that there were 5.7 million premises ready for service compared with the corporate plan target of 5.4 million premises. Similarly, activations were 440,000 premises ahead of target. There are now close to 2.7 million homes and businesses connected to the network, with around 40,000 premises signing up to NBN based plans each and every week. That's fast, affordable broadband to many, many premises around Australia.

The benefits of the NBN aren't just online. The project now has 24,000 workers designing, building and switching on services across the nation. There's more work underway at 1,850 discrete work sites, and around 200,000 additional premises are gaining access to the NBN each and every month. This is a big contrast to what we inherited from those opposite where only 51,000 people could access the network when they left office.