Mathias Cormann and Mitch Fifield, the infamous backers of Peter Dutton, today gave another out-of-touch assessment of their second-rate NBN and stated:
“Shareholder Ministers welcomed the results which confirm the company’s solid performance across all metrics”
Of course, we wouldn’t expect either of these two dynamic number crunchers to be drawing any attention to the inconvenient “metrics” below:
- A second-rate network that is $21.4 billion over budget.
- A rollout that is 4 years behind the promised timeline.
- A $900 million hit to taxpayers as a result of the bungled HFC rollout.
- The inability of NBNCo to secure private debt which required taxpayers to step in with a $19.5 billion loan.
- A recent three year deferral of when NBNCo was due to repay its government loan from 2021 to 2024 that is yet to be reflected in the budget papers.
- A 1,075 per cent blowout in the copper remediation bill to $640 million.
- Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) that has only increased by $1 in the last two years.
- 300,000 premises vanishing off the NBN rollout plan – despite the build cost of the rollout increasing by a further $2.1 billion.
- Small businesses reporting they are losing an average of $9,000 when switching to NBN.
The Coalition’s NBN is in such a mess that even after 5 years in the job Minister Cormann still hasn’t found anyone willing to lend NBNCo money on acceptable terms.
All the while New Zealand, the US and the UK have reduced the cost of deploying Fibre to the Premises by between 40 and 50 per cent.
The backers of Peter Dutton should at least have the humility to accept their failures and get on with the job of addressing them – rather than trying to spin results that are at odds with the reality of their second-rate NBN.
