NBN stops answering parliamentary inquiry questions on delays, cost blowouts

THE company building the embattled National Broadband Network is refusing to supply information to a parliamentary committee revealing the extent of delays, missed appointments and cost blowouts plaguing the project.

THE company building the embattled National Broadband Network is refusing to supply information to a parliamentary committee revealing the extent of delays, missed appointments and cost blowouts plaguing the project.

In some cases, NBN Co has stopped responding to questions, despite providing the same data in previous years.

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The government-owned company has this year failed to directly answer 11 questions on notice from the Senate committee charged with overseeing the $49 billion project.

NBN Co said the information was “commercial in confidence”, unavailable, or would be in its annual corporate plan.

NBN Co has gone silent on the project’s delays and cost blowouts.

Among the unanswered questions, NBN Co is refusing to supply updated data on its trouble-prone rollout of Telstra’s pay-TV cables.

Victoria was the hardest hit by last year’s suspension of the hybrid fibre-coaxial network — which provides slower internet speeds than the fibre-to-the-premises technology — with about 870,000 homes in the state to receive HFC by the end of the rollout.

While NBN claimed the HFC halt would include delays of only six to nine months, many Victorians have had delays in their suburbs blow out by more than two years.

NBN Co is also refusing to confirm whether the cost of its $1.6 billion contract with Telstra to roll out the HFC cables has blown out in the wake of the project’s suspension, which has since been lifted.

Victorians were the hardest hit by the suspension of the hybrid fibre-coaxial network.

NBN Co’s silence comes as complaints about the network to the telecommunications watchdog doubled last year, while total telecommunications complaints from Victorians soared by almost a half.

A spokeswoman for NBN Co said: “NBN Co takes its ­parliamentary obligations seriously and has dedicated ­significant amounts of staff and resources to answer more than 470 questions and sub-questions on notice in calendar year 2018 alone.”

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The Opposition’s communications spokeswoman Michelle Rowland said NBN Co’s transparency had been a “combination of evasion and spin”.

“At a time when Victorians continue to suffer ongoing delays and complaints continue to plague Malcolm Turnbull’s second-rate network, it adds insult to injury that a $49 billion taxpayer funded enterprise believes they are a law unto themselves,” she said.

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