Senator WILLIAMS (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (16:04): 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. Opposition senators interjecting— Senator WILLIAMS: 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)