COMMUNICATIONS Minister Stephen Conroy has been accused of misleading consumers over the robustness of NBN Co's corporate plan, after wrongly suggesting on radio today that the document had been signed off by the Auditor-General.
Senator Conroy today disputed a Coalition-commissioned analysis suggesting the NBN would cost $90 billion to complete as being based on “misleading statistics and misleading data”.
However, in doing so, he suggested NBN Co's corporate plan had been audited by the Australian National Audit office.
“The NBN is being built,” Senator Conroy told ABC radio.
“We have nearly one million homes under construction at the moment. The corporate plan, audited by the Auditor-General, is produced each year.
“And what you are seeing in that corporate plan is $37.4 billion is the cost of building the NBN, not as today the Coalition are claiming, $90 billion.”
The Australian has confirmed that the Auditor-General has not in fact audited NBN's corporate plan, signing off only on its annual financial statements.
Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said: “The NBN Co's corporate plan has not been audited by the Auditor-General. Conroy's statement that it has been is false and he knows it.”
Senator Conroy's claim the network is also on track to connect one million households is also being disputed.
NBN Co. admitted last month that only 190,000 to 220,000 homes would be passed by its cable by July this year, well under the 341,000 target in its corporate plan and 1.3 million predicted by Julia Gillard in December 2010.
“What we're seeing again from Stephen Conroy is the use of a completely meaningless metric designed to exaggerate the progress of the NBN and hide the fact that in terms of houses actually passed, Labor will be lucky to get to around 15 per cent of its original target of passing 1.3 million houses by June,” Mr Turnbull said.
“If Stephen Conroy wants us to believe this project is to be delivered on the budget Labor says it will cost, relying on the NBN corporate plan is not good enough.”
“Stephen Conroy needs to come clean and release how much it is actually costing the NBN to pass each household, which he has so far refused to do.”
Senator Conroy said Mr Turnbull, who will release the Coalition's broadband plan tomorrow, could not be believed on its claims about the NBN's eventual cost.
He said the network would be built for $37.5 billion, not $90 billion as claimed by the opposition.
Senator Conroy said Mr Turnbull was neglecting to tell voters that they would have to pay $5000 to tap into the Coalition's fibre network with a fibre cable, rather than a copper connection, to their home.
He said that was what British Telecom was charging households for fibre connections to the home.
“Malcolm Turnbull wants to charge Australians up to $5000 per home to connect to the National Broadband Network.
“That's what he wants to do. He wants Australian kids to be able to miss out on the best possible educational opportunities because they can't afford the $5000 the Coalition will change.”
Meanwhile, Senator Conroy confirmed Labor had completely abandoned its failed media reform package that it tried to secure support for in the last sitting week of parliament.
“As we said, the policy if parliament wanted to vote for it, it could vote for it; if it didn't want to, then that was the end of it,” he said.
“It won't be our policy going into the next election.”
