Mr LAMING (Bowman) (15:49): We were enjoying that contribution, too, I can assure you. I could have enjoyed listening to Ken and Derek. Being a roving complaints bureau, as the opposition is becoming as they travel around the country, scurrying around looking for unhappy people, is one way of surviving through the long and dreary years of opposition—wandering around seat-by-seat conducting NBN crisis meetings, where you put on some scones and wait for people to filter in, popping their ALP membership card above their head and sitting in the front row, given a complaint to read out, and then away they go. We had one of these in my electorate of Bowman, where not a single genuine complaint was elucidated for NBN Co. I'm not saying there are no genuine complaints. The TIO data is absolutely correct. We need to break up the complaints according to the amount of Australia that's connected. If you are going to double the footprint of NBN, then, self-evidently, you are going to double your complaints. If you have twice as many people connected to NBN, self-evidently there will be twice as many complaints. In fact, complaints per population are falling—a very inconvenient truth for the opposition. The other great concern of our good friends on the other side is that they promised the gold-plated monorail to every home—the super-fast government-run broadband, where everyone got the same colour curtains, and the same length, and it was all going to happen the day after they planned it. They got to the end of their six-year tenure and, of course, just 200,000 houses were NBN-ready. That sounds like a pretty significant number. Fifty thousand had been connected after six years and multiple failed starts. Fifty thousand sounds like a great number. There we were with 50,000 divided by 150 electorates. That's only 300 households per federal electorate. It's worth repeating: the 50,000 who were connected represent only around 300 households per electorate—that's two streets. Ms Rowland: No complaints in Bowman! Mr LAMING: I will take that interjection from the other side. No, after six years nothing had been done in my electorate of Bowman—zero. With an average of two streets connected after six years, you need to pick this up and ask yourself, in the counter-factual, had Labor continued with their plan how many of the complaints you hear today about our NBN would you have heard for Labor's NBN, where only 10,000 dwellings a year were being connected? They might have upped it to 50,000, but the reality is that it's not 300,000. You need to remember that every complaint you have about the coalition's NBN represents a complaint you'd have had with Labor's NBN, where they basically would drip-feed the nation with fibre to the home and virtually no competition in retail provision. That is quite an important statistic. If they haven't studied economics—and that's everyone on the other side, except one guy who went to ANU and did it through the sociology department—what they won't understand is that with competition between 140 providers you are going to get a drop in price and an increase in data availability. And that drop in price is around $40 a month. Those packages you see from Telstra and Optus are $40 a month cheaper than if you had government provided fibre to the home and no competition in the price at which it is provided. Take my electorate of Bowman: sure, we'd love a faster rollout, but there are only two potential pathways here. There is the technology mix being used by Scandinavia and by most of the developed world, outside of city states like Singapore, Hong Kong or Seoul, where population density is around 17,000 humans per square kilometre and different forms of economics do stack up. But that's not the case in Australian cities, where Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide have around 1,200 to 2,000 residents per square kilometre. There simply are not enough people paying internet bills to justify fibre to the premises. In Brisbane, where there are 1,200 humans per square kilometre, or in my mainland electorate of Redlands, where there are only 700 humans per square kilometre, there is simply a lot of money paid in rod and roping and not enough customers to pay for the service. That's why the simple premise of the coalition's approach is that we will roll out fibre when it is economically justifiable to do so. That lies at the heart of Labor's approach. They were going to roll out fibre, but six to eight years more slowly. They were going to roll out fibre at $20 to $30 billion more than the country had to spend on it. They can go all around the country collecting complaints, but they cannot escape that brutal reality.